A Slash employee spent $81,000 on AI tokens in a week, creating a meme shooter.
Fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, received an unexpected lesson in managing artificial intelligence costs. One of its employees spent over $81,000 on AI tokens in a single week while developing a meme game. The incident occurred after the company's management urged the team to use AI more actively for coding.
Director of Strategic Verticals Nicolas Briante took this call literally. He dedicated an entire day to working with Anthropic's Claude model, creating an arcade shooter called Brainrot Shooter. The game features meme characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
The problem was that each upload of the entire codebase context to the AI model consumed tokens. Over a day of active development, the amount quietly grew to tens of thousands of dollars. Briante himself called the incident a "real accident" and admitted he greatly underestimated the speed of AI consumption accumulation.
The company responded with humor. In a post on X, startup representatives joked that employees should now play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses. However, according to available data, the finance department has already reclassified the project from a "cost incident" to a strategic initiative.
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 limits. Another unnamed company received a $500 million bill for a month of using Anthropic's Claude, as management had not set restrictions for employees.
Expert opinion: This case is an excellent illustration of how the absence of clear limits on AI usage can lead to financial consequences that cannot be ignored. For crypto and fintech companies, where development speed is often a top priority, implementing AI token cost monitoring systems is becoming not just a recommendation but an urgent necessity. Without this, every "experiment" could result in an unexpected bill.