A Slash employee accidentally spent $81,000 on AI tokens while creating a meme shooter — and it paid off.
Fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, received an unexpected lesson in managing artificial intelligence expenses. One of the company's executives, Nicolas Briante, decided to take management's call to actively use AI for writing code literally — and spent over $81,000 on tokens in one week while creating a meme game.
How $81,000 went up in smoke on Claude in one day
Briante, who serves as Director of Strategic Verticals, dedicated an entire day to working with Anthropic's Claude model. His goal was to develop the shooter game Brainrot Shooter featuring absurd meme characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The problem turned out to be that during active development, he repeatedly loaded the context of the entire codebase, and each such query to the model consumes tokens. In one day, the amount grew to tens of thousands of dollars. Briante himself called the incident a "real accident" and admitted he underestimated how quickly AI consumption accumulates.
From expense incident to strategic project
The irony of fate is that after this story was covered, the game unexpectedly found its audience. In the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played it, total playtime amounted to 8,986 hours, and the average session per player was 1.3 hours. The peak number of concurrent gamers reached 437. The company received three incoming advertising placement requests, and the finance department reclassified the project from an expense incident to a strategic initiative. Slash is already reviewing its AI usage policy for writing code but has taken the situation with humor, suggesting employees "play the game so it can be written off as marketing expenses."
Slash is not the only company with such problems
Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced strict limits. A similar case occurred with another company that received a $500 million bill for one month of using Anthropic's Claude due to a lack of restrictions for employees. This clearly demonstrates that implementing AI in a corporate environment requires not only enthusiasm but also clear financial boundaries.
Expert opinion: The Slash story is an excellent example of how a lack of control over AI expenses can turn into both a financial disaster and an unexpected marketing success. But relying on luck in budget management is an unforgivable luxury for any serious company. The market is already moving toward implementing strict limits, and those who fail to adapt will have to pay for "accidents" out of their own pockets.