A Slash employee accidentally burned $81,000 on AI tokens while creating a meme shooter.
Fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, received an unexpected lesson in financial discipline in the age of artificial intelligence. One of the company's executives, Nicolas Briant, who is responsible for strategic verticals, took management's call to more actively use AI for writing code literally — and spent over $81,000 on tokens in a week creating a meme game.
Playing with Fire: How $81,000 Went Up in Smoke on Claude
Briant decided to spend an entire day developing a shooter game called Brainrot Shooter, using Anthropic's Claude model. He chose popular internet memes like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur as characters. The problem turned out to be that maintaining the context of the entire codebase with each request to the model consumed tokens — and after one day of work, the bill exceeded tens of thousands of dollars.
Briant himself called what happened a "real accident." He admitted that he underestimated how quickly AI consumption accumulates during active development when you repeatedly load the context of the entire project. Each request to the model costs tokens, and the amount grew to $81,267 over the week.
From Expense Incident to Marketing Strategy
The company's reaction was unexpected. Instead of punishing the employee, Slash responded humorously on social media platform X, suggesting colleagues play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses. The game unexpectedly found an audience: in the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played it, total playtime was 8,986 hours, and the average session lasted 1.3 hours. The peak number of concurrent gamers reached 437, and the company received three incoming requests for advertising placements.
The finance department promptly reclassified the project from an "expense incident" to a "strategic initiative." Slash is now reviewing its policy on using AI for writing code.
A Systemic Problem: Lessons from Uber and Other Giants
Slash is not the only company to have encountered this problem in practice. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced its own spending limits. And one unnamed company received a $500 million bill for a month of using Anthropic's Claude simply because management had not set limits for employees.
Expert opinion: This case is a vivid illustration that the economics of AI computing remains a "gray area" for most companies. Tokens are not just an abstract unit but real money. Until corporations implement strict monitoring and limit systems, such "accidents" will recur. And it's good if next time it's a game about memes, not a critical error in a production environment.