A Slash employee accidentally burned $81,000 worth of AI tokens while creating a meme shooter — and it became a strategy.
Fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, received an unexpected and costly lesson in managing artificial intelligence expenses. One of its employees spent over $81,000 on AI tokens in a single week while creating a meme game. What began as a curiosity ultimately transformed into a strategic project.
It all started when Slash's management urged the team to use AI more actively for writing code. 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 featuring meme characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
An "Accident" Worth Tens of Thousands
Briante did not expect the token bill to rise to $81,267. He called what happened a "real accident," admitting he underestimated how quickly expenses accumulate during active development. Each request to the model consumes tokens, and with repeated loading of the entire codebase context, the daily total soared to tens of thousands of dollars.
The reaction from Slash itself was unexpectedly positive. In a post on X, the startup joked that employees should "play the game so it can be written off as marketing expenses." However, the joke appears to have been prophetic. The company is now reviewing its policy on using AI for writing code.
From Incident to Strategy
After media coverage, the game unexpectedly found its audience. In the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played it, with a total playtime of 8,986 hours and an average session per player of 1.3 hours. The peak number of concurrent gamers reached 437. Moreover, the company received three incoming requests for advertising placements. The finance department reclassified the project from a "cost incident" to a "strategic initiative."
Slash is far from the first company to encounter this problem in practice. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced its own limits. A similar case occurred with an unnamed company that received a $500 million bill for one month of using Claude, when management had not set spending limits for employees.
Expert comment: This case clearly demonstrates that integrating AI into a corporate environment requires not only enthusiasm but also strict financial controls. While companies experiment, token bills can grow exponentially, turning "creativity" into a significant expense item. The market urgently needs tools for monitoring and limiting AI costs — otherwise, such "accidents" will become the norm.