Bot Verification Blocking Access to Case Document
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, to protect its servers against automated scraping by AI companies. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to impose computational costs on mass scraping while remaining negligible for legitimate individual users. The protection requires JavaScript and may conflict with browser extensions like JShelter.
What changed
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a server protection system using proof-of-work technology similar to Hashcash, to combat aggressive automated scraping of legal case documents by AI companies. The system presents a bot verification challenge to suspicious visitors, adding computational overhead that becomes significant at scale while remaining minimal for individual legitimate users. JavaScript is required to complete verification, and users with privacy extensions like JShelter must disable them for the domain to access content.
For users seeking to access case documents through BAILII, this technical measure creates an additional access step but does not impose legal compliance obligations. Legal professionals, researchers, and the public may experience brief access delays when the system detects automated access patterns. The implementation represents a technical security choice rather than a regulatory development.
Archived snapshot
Apr 18, 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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