In June 2026, the fintech startup Slash - valued at $1.4 billion - encouraged its team to use AI coding tools more. Nicolas Brillante, its head of strategic verticals, took that to heart and spent a day building a playable meme game called "Brainrot Shooter" with Claude.
By the end of the week, that experiment had run up $81,267 in Claude tokens. Brillante posted the bill publicly, calling it a genuine accident: he had underestimated how fast the cost adds up when you repeatedly load a full codebase into an AI agent during active development. The story went viral.
Why one week cost $81,000
A chat costs a few cents. An AI coding agent is a different animal. It reads your files, writes code, runs it, reads the errors, and tries again - and every step re-sends the growing pile of context back to the model. A long session on a big codebase re-bills the same files over and over.
Do that all day, for a week, and the meter you never see spins into five figures. Brillante is a smart engineer at a billion-dollar company. That is exactly the point: this is not a skill problem, it is a visibility problem.
It is not just startups
If you assume the giants have this figured out, they do not. The biggest, most technical companies in the world got caught by the same meter this year:
- Microsoft cut most internal Claude Code licenses across its Experiences & Devices group (Windows, Microsoft 365, Teams, Surface) with a June 30 deadline, after token costs blew through the budget - some engineers were running $500-$2,000 a month.
- Amazon - one of Anthropic's own biggest investors - now requires explicit sign-off before engineers use Claude Code on production work, steering them to a cheaper in-house tool. It also scrapped an internal leaderboard that ranked staff by AI usage once people started gaming it and driving compute costs up.
- Uber burned its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and now caps engineers at $1,500 a month per tool.
Startup or trillion-dollar enterprise, the failure is identical: thousands of people (or just one) with unmonitored, uncapped access to a tool that bills by the token.
What actually prevents this
Not banning AI - every company on this list wanted the productivity. What was missing was the boring infrastructure around it:
- Live visibility - spend per person and per project, updated daily, so an $80k week shows up on day one, not on the invoice.
- Alerts - a ping when someone's run rate goes vertical, while you can still do something about it.
- Caps - sensible per-person limits that turn a $81,000 surprise into a $2,000 heads-up.