Open-source tool poisons fonts to block AI web scrapers

The Register reports on ShieldFont, a new open-source project that embeds "poisoned" font data into web pages so AI scrapers extracting the text get corrupted or nonsensical content instead of the real copy. It's available now for publishers wanting to protect content from being harvested for AI training.

Why it matters: This is part of a growing counter-scraping arms race alongside watermarking (like Google's SynthID) and legal action from artists, as publishers look for technical rather than just legal ways to resist AI training-data collection. Expect scrapers to adapt via OCR or rendering pipelines, making this more of an escalating cat-and-mouse game than a permanent fix.