Bot Verification Page Using Proof-of-Work Protection
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system modelled on Hashcash, to protect its servers against automated scraping by AI companies. The system is designed to impose negligible delay on individual users while significantly increasing the computational cost of mass scraping operations. Website visitors using JavaScript-blocking extensions such as JShelter must disable those plugins to access the site.
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 201 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII has implemented a technical bot-verification measure rather than a regulatory change. Anubis is a proof-of-work challenge that all automated clients must complete to access site resources.
Compliance and IT professionals whose systems scrape or access BAILII programmatically should be aware that their clients may encounter proof-of-work challenges. Systems relying on headless browsers or JavaScript-disabled environments may need to be reconfigured to pass the verification, or operators should whitelist BAILII from automated access to avoid service disruption.
Archived snapshot
Apr 22, 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.
Related changes
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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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