Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to Content on BAILII
Summary
BAILII has deployed a bot verification system called Anubis on its website to protect against AI scraping. The system uses a Proof-of-Work scheme inspired by Hashcash to make mass scraping more computationally expensive. Users may encounter this verification page before accessing content. The system requires JavaScript and may be incompatible with privacy plugins like JShelter.
What changed
BAILII has added a bot verification page to protect its servers from AI scraping companies. The Anubis system uses Proof-of-Work (similar to Hashcash) to impose minimal load on individual users but significant computational cost on mass scrapers. This is described as a temporary measure while better fingerprinting techniques for headless browsers are developed.
Affected parties: General users accessing BAILII legal databases may encounter the verification page. Users with privacy plugins like JShelter may need to disable them for the domain to access content.
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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