An employee of a fintech startup accidentally spent $81,000 on AI tokens while creating a meme shooter.
A story worthy of a meme occurred at the fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion. One of its employees, Director of Strategic Verticals Nicolas Briante, spent over $81,000 on AI tokens in a week, creating... a meme game. The reason was an internal call from management to more actively use artificial intelligence for writing code.
Briante took the task literally and dove headfirst into development. He spent an entire day glued to the Claude model, creating a shooter game called Brainrot Shooter. The game features characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur — pure internet folklore. However, immersed in the process, he didn't notice how the token costs spiraled out of control.
An Accident Worth $81,267
Briante himself called what happened a "real accident." The problem was that during active development, he repeatedly uploaded the context of the entire codebase. Each request to the model consumes tokens, and in one day the amount grew to tens of thousands of dollars. The company reacted with humor: in a post on X, they offered employees to play the game so they could later write off the expenses as marketing costs. Nevertheless, Slash is already reviewing its policy on using AI for writing code.
From Incident to Strategic Project
Unexpectedly, the game 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 of 1.3 hours. The peak number of concurrent gamers reached 437. The company received three incoming requests for advertising placements. The finance department has already reclassified the project from a "cost incident" to a strategic initiative.
Slash is not the only company to face such costs in practice. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced its own limits. Another unnamed company received a $500 million bill for one month of using Claude from Anthropic — and that was without any restrictions for employees.
Expert opinion: This case is a vivid illustration of how quickly "unlimited" AI can turn a corporate budget into ruins. Companies implementing AI tools must immediately introduce strict limits and expense monitoring systems. Otherwise, every employee who decides to experiment risks leaving the company without working capital. In the world of crypto and fintech startups, where every dollar counts, this is no joke.