An employee of the fintech startup Slash accidentally "burned" $81,000 on AI tokens for a meme shooter.
The management of fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, urged the team to more actively use AI for writing code. One employee took this so literally that they spent over $81,000 on tokens for the AI model Claude in one week, creating... a meme game.
This concerns Nicola Briatte, Head of Strategic Verticals at Slash. He decided to spend a day using Claude to develop an arcade shooter called Brainrot Shooter. The game features characters from internet memes, such as Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The task was purely for entertainment, but the costs for AI inference went far beyond a typical experiment.
An "Accident" Worth Tens of Thousands of Dollars
Over the course of a week, Briatte's token expenses reached $81,267. He himself called what happened a "real accident." According to him, he underestimated how quickly AI consumption accumulates when repeatedly loading the context of the entire codebase. Each request to the model consumes tokens, and over a day's work, the sum grew to tens of thousands of dollars.
Slash responded to the incident with humor. In a post on X, startup representatives joked that employees should play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses. However, behind the jokes lies a serious problem: the company is now reviewing its policy on using AI for writing code.
From a Quirk to a Strategic Project
Despite the absurdity of the situation, the game unexpectedly found an 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 an "expense incident" to a strategic initiative.
Slash is not the only company to encounter this in practice. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced its own spending limits. And one unnamed company received a $500 million bill for one month of using Claude from Anthropic, as management had not set restrictions for employees.
Expert opinion: This case is a vivid illustration that integrating AI into the corporate environment requires not only enthusiasm but also clear financial controls. Without token limits and expense monitoring, even a small team can "burn through" a budget comparable to an annual payroll fund. The AI tools market urgently needs built-in cost management mechanisms; otherwise, such stories will become widespread.