Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Page Blocks Legal Case Access
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Page Blocks Legal Case Access

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Summary

BAILII has implemented a bot verification page (Anubis) using Proof-of-Work technology to protect its servers against AI companies scraping legal databases. The system requires users to complete JavaScript-based challenges to verify they are not automated bots before accessing case documents. The page notes that this is a temporary measure while more sophisticated headless browser detection is developed.

Published by BAILII on bailii.org . Detected, standardized, and enriched by GovPing. Review our methodology and editorial standards .

What changed

BAILII deployed Anubis, a bot verification system using Hashcash-style Proof-of-Work challenges, to block AI companies from scraping legal case documents. The page is shown when automated browser access is detected. Users with legitimate access may need to disable JavaScript-modifying browser extensions to proceed.\n\nLegal professionals and researchers relying on automated access to BAILII case law may need to adjust their tools or manually complete verification challenges. AI training data providers and legal tech companies scraping case law will face increased friction under this protection mechanism.

Archived snapshot

Apr 18, 2026

GovPing 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.

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Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Instrument
Notice
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Technology companies
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Access control systems Bot detection Legal database administration
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Data Privacy
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Cybersecurity Intellectual Property

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