Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish. Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost seems like magic if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of computer fonts. A noun will never be swapped for a verb, for example, and a verb will never be swapped for an adjective: Swaps only come from the same grammatical pool.
- ▪A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish.
- ▪Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost seems like magic if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of computer fonts.
- ▪A noun will never be swapped for a verb, for example, and a verb will never be swapped for an adjective: Swaps only come from the same grammatical pool.
The Register publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 369 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/30/open-source-project-fools-ai-scrapers-with-poisoned-font/5281303 |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:19:23 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T18:57:29.406Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T18:57:29.406Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | sLl5dK8TQTd7 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); AI and ML Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font ShieldFont is available today if you've got copy that needs protecting, we mean Brandon Vigliarolo Brandon Vigliarolo GOVERNMENT AND IT NEWS REPORTER Published thu 30 Jul 2026 // 18:19 UTC If you don't want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there's a new way to stop them that doesn't involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Register
