Free Font That Neural Networks Can't Read Created to Protect Sites from AI Bots Data Collection

ShieldFont, developed by IT specialists and presented in August 2026, is a free font designed to protect website text from AI data collection. When a page uses ShieldFont, visitors see the original author's text normally, but scraping programs read different words from the HTML code. The scraped text retains grammatical correctness and logical flow but loses the original meaning, potentially corrupting data used to train neural networks. For example, the phrase "good luck reading this, you useless robot" becomes "good comfort reading this, you yellow barrier" for scrapers. The algorithm selects replacements from the same grammatical and semantic category, using a dictionary divided into about 250 categories. On average, it changes about a quarter of the words. The technology is based on the GSUB glyph substitution mechanism of OpenType fonts, extending it to entire words. The authors provide three ready-made substitution dictionaries and instructions on GitHub for creating custom ones. The font comes in a desktop version of about 5 MB and a compressed web version of about 800 KB. It is based on the modified Optik typeface from the Danish studio Playtype, developed by designers from Amsterdam studio Seneda & Abrucio together with Playtype IT specialists. The technology does not provide complete protection, as scrapers can use OCR, analyze rendered content, or download the font and GSUB dictionaries to reverse-engineer substitutions. It also poses risks for SEO, as search engines may index the substituted text, and can cause issues with translators, copy-paste, and screen readers. The developers have provided a separate mode for screen readers. ShieldFont aims to slow down mass unauthorized scraping, increase costs, and make collected texts unpredictable. The technology is available in an alpha version, with an online encoder, a React component, and CSS and CDN integration options, with instructions on the official website and GitHub.