ShieldFont launches open-source font that swaps words in page source to disrupt AI scraping

ShieldFont is an open-source tool that replaces roughly 25% of words, nearly half of content words, in a page's HTML with same-grammar-class decoys while the font restores the original text on screen. Its authors report that across 1,500 passages this caused 50% to lose their original factual claim, and that about one in ten chunks still passed the FineWeb-Edu quality filter after shielding. The project ships three built-in mappings plus support for custom ones, and its FAQ states the font itself is a codebook from which all 11,962 word pairs were recovered, so the defense targets mass scraping cost rather than secrecy.