Bot Verification Required to Access British and Irish Legal Information Institute
Summary
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, to protect its servers against aggressive AI web scraping. The system uses a Hashcash-style mechanism that adds minimal load for individual users but significantly increases the cost and computational burden for mass scrapers. Users are advised to disable JavaScript-disabling plugins such as JShelter to access the site.
What changed
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work verification system, to protect its legal database infrastructure from mass AI web scraping. The system requires users to complete a computational challenge before accessing content, similar to Hashcash anti-spam mechanisms. Legitimate users with modern browsers and enabled JavaScript experience minimal impact, while automated scraping at scale becomes economically prohibitive.
Legal researchers and professionals using automated tools to access BAILII should be aware that standard scraping approaches may no longer function without modification. Organizations relying on bulk legal research data extraction should review their access methods and potentially adjust workflows or seek alternative data access arrangements.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-disabling plugins like JShelter for BAILII domains
- Enable JavaScript to complete bot verification
- Monitor for potential access issues if using automated research tools
Archived snapshot
Apr 16, 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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