Bot Verification Page for Court Case EWCA/Civ/2026/401
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system, to protect its servers against aggressive AI web scraping. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to increase the cost of mass scraping while allowing legitimate users to access case documents. Users with JavaScript-blocking extensions such as JShelter must disable them to proceed.
What changed
BAILII implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot mechanism, to protect its legal database infrastructure from automated scraping by AI companies. The system adds computational overhead that is negligible for individual users but becomes significant at scale, reducing the viability of mass data extraction. This affects legal researchers, professionals, and any party seeking to access UK court decisions through BAILII. The actual case content for EWCA/Civ/2026/401 was not accessible during this access attempt.
Affected parties accessing UK case law through BAILII should ensure their browser environment supports modern JavaScript and disable plugins that may interfere with proof-of-work challenges. While this does not create legal obligations, it represents a technical barrier to accessing publicly available legal information that may require configuration adjustments by regular users of legal databases.
What to do next
- Disable JShelter or similar JavaScript-blocking extensions for bailii.org
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.
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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
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