Type foundry Playtype and creative studio Seneda & Abrucio (S&A) released ShieldFont on July 30, 2026 - a free, open-source typeface that feeds altered text to AI scrapers while remaining legible to human readers. Available in six weights, the font is designed to make mass, unauthorized data harvesting riskier and more costly for companies that ignore opt-out protocols.
How ShieldFont works
ShieldFont does not rely on optical illusions. Instead, it targets the source code behind rendered text. Most mass scrapers read HTML, where the font uses OpenType glyph substitution to swap select words. The substituted text keeps grammatical coherence but changes the original meaning of sentences, making it more likely to pass AI quality filters and enter training datasets.
"Every detail had to serve the human eye, while the hidden system underneath served an entirely different purpose," said Jeppe Pendrup, the font's type designer.
Testing and effectiveness
In controlled tests, 55.8% of shielded passages no longer made the same factual claim as the original. Trials across publicly available scraping pipelines also showed that ShieldFont content could survive filtering and land in AI training data. The altered wording remains coherent, so automated systems often fail to flag and discard it.
"ShieldFont is not an anti-AI project," said S&A founders Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio. "We're simply against the idea that publishing is the same as consenting. We saw how existing opt-out protocols such as robots.txt were being routinely bypassed, so we wanted to create one that could enforce itself." The answer, they said, was to turn the content itself into the opt-out. The project is one of several efforts to return control to creatives, a topic we cover in our AI for Creatives series.
Open-source toolkit and implementation
ShieldFont is more than a single typeface. It includes a toolkit anyone can use to apply the same protection to their own font. "Typography has always helped humanity preserve and share its ideas. Now it can help protect them too. That is why ShieldFont had to be open source, so its system can grow beyond Optik and become part of many different typefaces," said Daniél Andreasen, CEO of Playtype.
Writers and developers can implement ShieldFont via an online encoder, a React component on GitHub, or CSS and CDN integration. A custom font builder also lets users apply the ShieldFont protocol to another compatible typeface with a private mapping. This makes it a practical option for anyone looking to shield written content, a topic we explore in AI for Writers.
The creators acknowledge ShieldFont is not unbreakable. A scraper targeting a specific site could inspect the font and reverse the mapping. But mass scraping operations cannot know in advance which sites use ShieldFont or which mapping, so the tool adds friction and raises the cost of unchecked data collection.
Why this matters for Creatives
ShieldFont gives designers, writers, and developers a self-enforcing method to protect published work - no legal demands or platform changes required. It runs on any site that can host a web font, and the open-source model means it can adapt to many typefaces. Full methodology and benchmark data are available in the project's white paper. For creatives who see their work scraped without consent, it offers a way to make that practice harder to ignore.
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