BAILII Bot Protection Challenge Page for Legal Database Access
Summary
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot protection system based on Hashcash principles, to prevent AI companies from scraping its legal database. The system adds computational load to mass scraping attempts while remaining negligible for individual users. The protection requires modern JavaScript and may conflict with privacy plugins like JShelter.
What changed
BAILII has added Anubis bot protection to its legal database website. The system implements a proof-of-work challenge requiring computational work from automated scrapers while imposing negligible delay on individual human users. The protection specifically targets AI companies that cause server downtime through aggressive scraping.
Legal researchers and practitioners accessing UK court decisions through BAILII may encounter the challenge page and should be aware that disabling privacy plugins like JShelter may be necessary for access. The technical measure does not change the underlying legal content but affects automated research tools that rely on bulk data collection.
Archived snapshot
Apr 22, 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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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.
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