Anubis Bot Verification Challenge for Website Protection
Summary
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, to protect its servers against aggressive AI website scraping. The system uses a Hashcash-style proof-of-work scheme that imposes minimal load on individual users but increases operational costs for mass scrapers. Users are advised to disable JavaScript-disabling plugins such as JShelter for the BAILII domain to ensure access.
What changed
BAILII has added Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification challenge, to its website infrastructure. The system requires users to complete computational tasks before accessing content, designed to deter AI companies from scraping legal databases at scale while remaining transparent about its purpose and implementation.
For legal professionals and researchers accessing BAILII, this change may require adjusting browser security plugins. The measure is positioned as a temporary solution while more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques for headless browsers are developed. Organizations using automated access to BAILII content should review their compliance with the website's access policies.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-disabling plugins such as JShelter for the BAILII domain
Archived snapshot
Apr 15, 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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