Bot Verification Challenge Blocks UK Supreme Court 2026 Judgments
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) is displaying a bot verification challenge on UK Supreme Court 2026 judgment pages. The site uses Anubis, a proof-of-work protection system, to prevent AI companies from scraping content. Users must complete JavaScript-based verification to access the judgments. No regulatory obligations, deadlines, or compliance requirements are created by this access barrier.
“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.”
About this source
GovPing monitors UK Supreme Court Judgments (BAILII) for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 2 changes logged to date.
What changed
This is not a regulatory instrument but rather a technical access barrier page. BAILII, which hosts UK Supreme Court judgments, has implemented Anubis—a proof-of-work challenge system—to protect against mass AI scraping. Users encountering the page must disable JavaScript-blocking extensions such as JShelter and complete the verification to access judgment content.
Legal professionals, researchers, and other parties seeking UK Supreme Court 2026 judgments through BAILII will need to complete the bot verification before accessing the underlying legal content. There are no compliance obligations or regulatory implications arising from this access mechanism.
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!
Loading...
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
Get daily alerts for UK Supreme Court Judgments (BAILII)
Daily digest delivered to your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
About this page
Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission
Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from UKSC.
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.
Classification
Who this affects
Taxonomy
Browse Categories
Get alerts for this source
We'll email you when UK Supreme Court Judgments (BAILII) publishes new changes.
Subscribed!
Optional. Filters your digest to exactly the updates that matter to you.