Anubis Bot Verification Challenge Blocks AI Scraping on BAILII
Summary
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge system based on Hashcash principles, to protect its servers against aggressive AI web scraping. The system imposes negligible additional load on individual users but becomes computationally expensive at scale for mass scrapers. The measure is described as a temporary solution while the organization works on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers through methods such as font rendering analysis. Users are advised to disable JavaScript-disabling plugins like JShelter for the BAILII domain.
“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 Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge mechanism, to its website as a protective measure against AI companies scraping legal databases at scale. The system uses a Hashcash-style computational burden to make mass scraping economically unfeasible while remaining transparent to legitimate users. Website administrators note this is a placeholder solution, with more sophisticated headless browser detection (including font rendering analysis) planned as a long-term alternative.
For users accessing BAILII for EU case law and legal information, the immediate practical impact is minimal: legitimate visitors using standard browsers will experience no meaningful disruption. However, researchers or organizations using automated scripts or AI tools to access BAILII content should be aware that such methods may now be blocked or significantly throttled by the proof-of-work challenge.
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!
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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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