A Slash employee spent $81,000 on AI tokens in one week to create a meme shooter — and it paid off.
Fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, received an unexpected but instructive lesson in managing artificial intelligence costs. One of its employees, the head of strategic verticals, spent over $81,000 on AI tokens in just one week while creating a meme game.
A $81,267 Accident
The trigger was an internal company call to use AI more actively for writing code. Nicolas Briante took it literally and dedicated an entire day to working with Anthropic's Claude model. The result was a shooter game called Brainrot Shooter featuring characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
The problem was that during active development, he repeatedly loaded the context of the entire codebase, unaware of how quickly token consumption was accumulating. Each request to the model cost money, and over the course of the day, the total grew to tens of thousands of dollars. Briante himself called the incident a "real accident" and admitted he underestimated the rate of spending.
From Incident to Strategic Project
The company's reaction was unexpected. Instead of punishing the employee, Slash responded with humor, suggesting everyone play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses. And it worked: within the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played Brainrot Shooter, with total playtime exceeding 8,986 hours. The peak number of concurrent users reached 437, and the company received three requests for ad placements.
The finance department reclassified the project from an expense incident to a strategic initiative. Slash is now reviewing its AI usage policy, but with a newfound understanding of its real potential.
The Scale of the Problem: Not Just Slash
This is not an isolated case. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced strict limits. Another company received a $500 million bill for one month of using Anthropic's Claude — all due to a lack of restrictions for employees. The Slash case is a stark reminder: AI is a powerful but expensive tool, and without cost control, it can lead to unexpected financial consequences.
Expert opinion: The Slash story demonstrates the dual nature of AI in a corporate environment. On one hand, it poses the risk of uncontrolled costs. On the other, it resulted in an unexpected marketing success that turned $81,000 into an effective advertising campaign. The key takeaway for companies: AI should be implemented with clear limits, but experimentation should not be feared — sometimes an accident can become the best investment.