Bot Verification Challenge Blocks Legal Case Access
Summary
BAILII has 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 scrapers while remaining negligible for individual users. The actual court case content (EWHC Admin 2026/915) is inaccessible behind this verification challenge.
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 201 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work verification challenge, as a protective measure against AI companies aggressively scraping its legal databases. The system adds computational overhead for mass scrapers while having minimal impact on legitimate individual users. Legal researchers and practitioners accessing court documents through automated tools may need to adjust their workflows to accommodate this verification barrier.
Affected parties include legal researchers, compliance professionals, and automated legal research systems that rely on programmatic access to BAILII case law. Those using JavaScript-blocking browser extensions such as JShelter will need to disable these plugins for BAILII domains to pass verification.
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.
Related changes
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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
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