An employee of a fintech startup accidentally spent $81,000 on AI tokens while creating a meme shooter.
A story that could serve as a plot for a fable about corporate efficiency unfolded within the fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion. The company's Head of Strategic Verticals, Nicolas Briante, took the internal call to more actively use AI for writing code a bit too literally. The result — a bill for Anthropic Claude tokens totaling $81,267 in a single week.
Briante decided to spend a day creating a shooter game called Brainrot Shooter, filled with meme characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. As he himself admitted, he underestimated how quickly token consumption accumulates during intensive development. Each request to the model, especially when uploading the entire codebase as context, burns through tokens. Over the course of the day, the amount grew to tens of thousands of dollars.
From Accident to Strategy
Briante himself called the incident a "real accident." However, the company responded with unexpected humor: in a post on X, Slash representatives joked that employees should now play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses. The irony of fate is that in the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played Brainrot Shooter, total playtime amounted to 8,986 hours, and the average session lasted 1.3 hours. The peak concurrent player count reached 437.
Moreover, the company received three incoming requests for ad placements. The finance department, after assessing the situation, reclassified the project from an "expense incident" to a "strategic initiative." This is a brilliant example of how an unexpected improvisation can turn into a full-fledged business case.
A Systemic Problem: AI Budgets Going Down the Drain
Slash is far from the first company to encounter this problem in practice. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced strict limits. Another unnamed company received a $500 million bill from Anthropic for a month of using Claude — simply because management had set no restrictions for employees.
Expert opinion. This case is a vivid illustration that integrating AI into the corporate environment requires not only enthusiasm but also strict financial controls. Tokens are not a free resource; they are real money. Companies that fail to implement limits and monitor AI spending today risk receiving bills that could shock even the most optimistic CFOs. The Slash story is a funny but instructive wake-up call for the entire market.