An employee of the fintech startup Slash accidentally spent $81,000 on AI tokens while creating a meme shooter.
This week, the crypto and fintech world was shaken by a story that is both amusing and thought-provoking about the real cost of using artificial intelligence. An employee of the startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, spent over $81,000 on AI tokens in seven days while developing a meme game.
It all started when the company's management urged the team to more actively integrate AI into code writing. Nicolas Briante, head of strategic verticals, took this call literally. He dedicated an entire day to working with Anthropic's Claude model, creating a shooter game called Brainrot Shooter. The game features internet meme characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
A real accident worth tens of thousands
Briante himself admitted it was a "real accident." He underestimated how quickly AI token consumption would accumulate when repeatedly loading the entire codebase context. Each request to the model burned tokens, and by the end of the day, the total had exceeded tens of thousands of dollars. Ultimately, the weekly bill reached $81,267.
The company's reaction was unexpectedly positive. In a post on X, Slash representatives humorously suggested employees "play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses." However, the startup is now seriously reconsidering its policy on using AI for code writing.
From incident to strategy
The story took an unexpected turn. In the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played Brainrot Shooter, with a total playtime of 8,986 hours and an average session of 1.3 hours. The peak number of concurrent gamers reached 437. The company received three incoming advertising requests. The finance department reclassified the project from "expense incident" to "strategic initiative."
This case is not isolated. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced strict limits. And one unnamed company received a $500 million bill for one month of using Claude. It is clear that without controlling AI token expenses, businesses risk facing financial surprises.
Expert opinion: This story is a vivid example of how quickly AI resource consumption can grow in the absence of limits. Companies integrating AI into development should set budgets and monitor expenses in advance, otherwise an "$81,000 accident" could become routine. And the fact that the mishap turned into a marketing success shows that in the crypto industry, even mistakes can be monetized.