AI coding tools promise to help developers build software faster than ever. But for one startup employee in San Francisco, that convenience came with a jaw-dropping price tag. A seemingly harmless side project ended up consuming more than Rs 75 lakh worth of AI credits in just one week, turning into an expensive reminder of how quickly AI costs can spiral when spending isn’t monitored. Keep reading to know what happened.
AI Bills Are Becoming A Growing Problem
The incident took place at San Francisco-based fintech startup Slash. The company revealed on X that one of its employees, Nicolas Brilliante, accidentally spent more than $80,000 (around Rs 75 lakh) in AI credits while building a game called “Brainrot Shooter.”
The startup had recently encouraged employees to spend more time “vibe coding,” a term commonly used to describe building software quickly with AI coding assistants.
Sharing the incident online, Slash joked, “We encouraged the company last week to start vibe coding more but @nickbruhman burned $80k in credits on the Slash card for a brainrot shooter.” The company added, “Pls play it so we can write this off as a marketing expense.”
The game itself is fairly simple. Set in a Minecraft-style world, players shoot internet meme-inspired characters with names like “skibidi toilet” and “tung tung tung sahur.”
Brilliante later shared what appeared to be his AI usage dashboard, showing total AI spending of $81,267. Reacting to the incident, he wrote on X, “This was a genuine accident, I underestimated my own ability.”
As the story spread online, prediction market platform Polymarket described it as another example of how AI development costs can quickly get out of control. Brilliante himself later admitted, “This is actually insane, am I going to become a case study for how AI spend can get out of control.”
The incident comes as businesses worldwide begin paying much closer attention to AI expenses. While coding assistants can boost productivity, unrestricted access to advanced AI models can generate unexpectedly large bills within days.
Recent reports have already highlighted similar cases. One unnamed company reportedly spent nearly $500 million in a single month on Anthropic’s Claude AI services after failing to set usage limits for employees.