BAILII Blocks Automated Access with Anubis Proof-of-Work System
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge system, to block automated scraping by AI companies. The system uses Hashcash-style computational requirements that are negligible for individual users but become costly at scale for mass scrapers. Users with JavaScript-disabling plugins such as JShelter must disable them to access BAILII resources.
“Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam.”
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII Europe Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 63 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII has added an Anubis proof-of-work challenge to all automated access requests, requiring JavaScript execution before content is served. The system is designed to make mass scraping computationally expensive while imposing negligible overhead on legitimate individual users.
Legal research platforms and technology companies that rely on automated access to BAILII databases may need to adjust their scraping practices or implement JavaScript-capable request handlers to retrieve content.
Archived snapshot
Apr 23, 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!
Loading...
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.
Related changes
Get daily alerts for BAILII Europe Recent Decisions
Daily digest delivered to your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
About this page
Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission
Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
Classification
Who this affects
Taxonomy
Browse Categories
Get alerts for this source
We'll email you when BAILII Europe Recent Decisions publishes new changes.
Subscribed!
Optional. Filters your digest to exactly the updates that matter to you.