Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to Content
Summary
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, on its legal database website. The system uses a Hashcash-style challenge to impede AI scraping while allowing legitimate human users through. Users with JavaScript-blocking plugins like JShelter must disable them to access content.
“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 BAILII Europe Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 63 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII has added an anti-bot verification layer (Anubis) to its website infrastructure. The system presents a proof-of-work challenge to visitors, designed to make mass scraping by AI companies economically costly while adding minimal friction for individual users. This is an infrastructure change, not a regulatory action.
For compliance professionals, this has no direct regulatory implications. Organizations conducting automated research on EU case law through BAILII should update their scraping tools to handle proof-of-work challenges or enable JavaScript in their crawlers.
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!
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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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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
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.
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