A Slash employee spent $81,000 on AI tokens to create a meme shooter — coincidence or a new strategy?
The head of strategic verticals at fintech startup Slash (company valuation — $1.4 billion) spent over $81,000 on artificial intelligence tokens in just one week. The cause was creating a meme game using Claude, which turned into an unexpected financial and marketing case.
Nicolas Briante took the company's internal call to use AI more actively for writing code more than literally. He spent an entire day using the Claude model to develop a shooter called Brainrot Shooter — featuring characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Over that week, his token expenses reached $81,267.
Briante himself called the incident a "real accident." He admitted that he underestimated how quickly AI consumption accumulates when repeatedly loading the entire codebase context during active development. Each request to the model consumes tokens, and in one day the amount grew to tens of thousands of dollars.
From expense incident to strategic project
The company Slash itself responded to the incident with humor, suggesting employees "play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses." However, after media coverage, the project unexpectedly gained an audience. In the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played it, total gameplay time amounted to 8,986 hours, and the average session per player was 1.3 hours. The peak number of concurrent gamers reached 437. The company received three incoming advertising placement requests. The finance department reclassified the project from an expense incident to a strategic initiative.
Slash is not the only company to face such a situation 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 from Anthropic — management simply did not set restrictions for employees.
My expert opinion: This case is a clear illustration of how the absence of clear limits on AI usage can lead to unexpected financial consequences. But in the world of crypto and meme culture, such "accidents" sometimes turn into powerful marketing assets. The question is just how many companies are willing to pay $81,000 for a viral effect.