Breaking

Seneda & Abrucio and Playtype release ShieldFont, a typeface that poisons AI scrapers' training data

September 4, 2026 at 16:25 EDT

Open Source
Security
Foundation Models

A free typeface called ShieldFont is built to make unauthorized large language model training more expensive: people still read the intended words on screen, while scrapers that harvest raw HTML collect fluent English that no longer says the same thing.

July 30, 2026 · Seneda & Abrucio × Playtype

One page. Two texts.

ShieldFont lets people read the original sentence. Mass scrapers that skip rendering copy fluent decoy English from the HTML instead.

How the swap works

1. EncodeDecoy words go into the HTML.

→

2. RenderThe font restores the original on screen.

→

3. ScrapeNon-rendering bots keep the decoy.

→

4. FilterMost pages drop; survivors still poison.

24.4%

of all running words swapped

45.8%

of content words swapped

55.8%

of news passages break meaning

90%+

of previously passing pages rejected

Quality-filter outcome

Dropped never trains. Kept is still wrong.

Of pages that would have passed a public educational-quality filter, about 90 in 100 are rejected after shielding; about 10 still pass, carrying 19.4% false-meaning words.

~90

discarded

~10

still pass, poisoned

Cost to recover the on-screen words

Drawing the page costs 5–13× a plaintext fetch

HTML scrapes are cheap. Rendering first, then reading the pixels, is the bypass — and the bill scales with every page.

1×

HTML scrape

5×

low estimate

13×

high estimate

What it offers

A self-enforcing opt-out. Publishing is no longer treated as consent. Dropped pages never train; pages that survive still carry 19.4% words that assert nothing true.

What it cannot stop

A determined reader of the screen. The font can be inverted. Headless browsers and OCR recover the original. Search, copy-paste, and translation see the decoy. English-only, v0 alpha.

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