Anubis Proof-of-Work Bot Verification Blocking Access
Summary
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, to protect its server infrastructure against aggressive AI web scraping. The system uses Hashcash-style computational challenges to impose costs on mass scraping operations while remaining minimally burdensome for legitimate users. Website visitors using anti-bot plugins like JShelter must disable these tools to access BAILII content.
What changed
BAILII has added Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, as a protective layer against automated scraping by AI companies. The system presents a computational challenge that adds negligible delay for individual users but significantly increases the resource cost of mass scraping operations.
Organizations accessing BAILII for legal research may need to adjust their automated data collection practices or disable anti-bot browser extensions when accessing the platform. Legal professionals relying on automated research workflows should ensure their systems are compatible with JavaScript-dependent verification mechanisms.
Archived snapshot
Apr 21, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
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