Bot Verification Page Blocks Access
Summary
BAILII has deployed a proof-of-work anti-bot system called Anubis on its England and Wales case law database. The system requires visitors to perform computational work before accessing content, designed to make mass automated scraping by AI companies economically unviable. The mechanism operates in the style of Hashcash and temporarily creates access friction for all users while the administrators refine fingerprinting techniques for headless browsers.
Affected parties include legal researchers, AI companies, and any parties attempting to programmatically access BAILII's content. The system does not impose regulatory obligations but creates practical access barriers for automated tools.
What changed
BAILII implemented a proof-of-work verification system (Anubis) on its England and Wales case law portal. The system requires users to complete computational challenges before accessing content, raising access barriers for automated scraping tools and AI data collectors. The mechanism uses JavaScript-based proof-of-work in the style of Hashcash to impose computational costs on mass scrapers.
Legal database users, AI researchers, and automated law tools face increased friction when accessing BAILII content. The system does not create compliance obligations but may require adjustments to automated research workflows.
Archived snapshot
Apr 21, 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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