Bot Verification Required to Access Legal Case
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a Proof-of-Work bot-verification system, to protect its servers from AI scraping. The system requires JavaScript to solve computational challenges before accessing legal case documents. Website administrators indicated Anubis is a temporary measure while they develop fingerprinting techniques to identify headless browsers. Users with JavaScript-disabling plugins like JShelter must disable them for the domain.
“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
BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, is the open-access publisher of UK case law. The England and Wales Recent Decisions feed aggregates every newly published judgment from the High Court, Court of Appeal, and specialist divisions: Chancery, Commercial Court, Administrative Court, Family, Patents, Technology and Construction. Around 200 published opinions a month. BAILII is the closest thing to a free Westlaw for UK judgments and the standard citation source for academic and practitioner work that does not have a paid database licence. GovPing tracks each new decision as it appears, with the case name, court, judge, and citation. Watch this if you brief English commercial litigation, follow Chancery and TCC trends, or research UK judgments from outside a paid platform.
What changed
BAILII implemented a Proof-of-Work verification system called Anubis on its case document pages. The system presents a computational challenge requiring JavaScript execution before users can access legal case documents. This is designed to deter mass AI scraping by making automated access computationally expensive while adding minimal load for individual legitimate users.
Web scrapers, legal research tools, and AI companies accessing BAILII case documents will need to either solve the Proof-of-Work challenges or disable their automated access. Users with privacy plugins like JShelter that block JavaScript features must whitelist the BAILII domain to access case documents.
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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