A Slash startup employee burned $81,000 on AI tokens in a week while creating a meme shooter.
Nikolay Briante, head of strategic verticals at fintech startup Slash (company valuation: $1.4 billion), took management's call to more actively use AI for writing code more than literally. The result: an Anthropic token bill of $81,267 for one week and a viral meme game.
Briante spent an entire day creating an arcade shooter called Brainrot Shooter, using Anthropic's Claude model. The game features meme characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. According to the developer himself, he "underestimated how quickly token consumption accumulates" when loading the entire codebase context with each request, causing the cost of model calls to grow exponentially.
Initially, the incident was seen as an expensive mishap. However, after the story hit the media, the situation changed dramatically. In the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played the game, with total playtime reaching 8,986 hours and an average session lasting 1.3 hours. Peak concurrent players hit 437. The company received three incoming advertising placement requests.
From cost incident to strategic initiative
Slash's finance department reclassified the project from "incidental expenses" to a strategic marketing initiative. On social media platform X, startup representatives joked that employees should "play the game so it can be written off as marketing expenses." The company is reviewing its policy on using AI for code writing.
Slash is far from the only company facing this "hidden consumption" effect. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it imposed strict limits. Another unnamed company received a $500 million bill for one month of Claude usage without setting preliminary restrictions for employees.
Cryptalist Analytics: This case is an excellent illustration of how a lack of AI hygiene culture and clear token consumption limits can lead to financial surprises. However, as Slash's experience shows, even an expensive mistake can be turned into an effective marketing move if the company is flexible and creative enough. The market for AI agents and tokens demands a new level of discipline from businesses — or, at the very least, a good sense of humor.