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Anubis Proof-of-Work Bot Protection Blocks Case Access

Favicon for www.bailii.org BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions
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Summary

BAILII's Anubis bot protection system is blocking access to EWHC/Admin/2026/858. Anubis implements a Hashcash-style proof-of-work challenge to deter mass scraping by AI companies. Users must disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter to proceed. The system aims to make automated scraping economically costly while legitimate users experience minimal delay.

What changed

The Anubis proof-of-work verification page has replaced access to case EWHC/Admin/2026/858. This is a technical protection mechanism designed to prevent mass automated scraping of BAILII's legal database by AI companies. The system uses a Hashcash-style proof-of-work scheme that adds computational cost to each page request.

Users attempting to access the underlying court judgment must complete the proof-of-work challenge by enabling JavaScript and disabling anti-tracking plugins like JShelter. This affects legal researchers, AI developers scraping case law, and automated legal research systems that rely on bulk data access.

What to do next

  1. Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter for this domain to access the case

Archived snapshot

Apr 14, 2026

GovPing 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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Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Published
March 18th, 2026
Instrument
Notice
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Technology companies Legal professionals
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Bot protection Access control Legal research
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy Judicial Administration

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