Bot Verification Challenge Page for Legal Database Access
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has implemented Anubis, a bot verification system using Proof-of-Work (Hashcash-style) technology to combat aggressive AI web scraping. The system adds computational load for mass scrapers while remaining negligible for legitimate individual users. BAILII notes this is a temporary measure while more sophisticated fingerprinting of headless browsers is developed.
What changed
BAILII introduced a bot verification challenge page that now appears when accessing their legal database. The system uses Proof-of-Work calculations to differentiate between human users and automated scraping tools. The administrator notes this is a compromise solution while more advanced browser fingerprinting techniques are developed to identify headless browsers.
For legal researchers and practitioners accessing England and Wales case law through BAILII, the verification may present occasional friction. Users of privacy-enhancing browser extensions like JShelter may need to whitelist the BAILII domain to access content. The implementation does not create any regulatory obligations for legal professionals, law firms, or other parties.
Archived snapshot
Apr 17, 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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