From $180 to $82,000 in 48 Hours: The Gemini API Key Leak Bankrupting Small Dev Teams

A three-person developer team accidentally exposed their Google Gemini API key, which was scraped and abused to run extensive requests that generated an $82,000 Google Cloud bill in 48 hours; Google declined full remediation citing the shared-responsibility model and the platform's lack of rigid financial quota protections, prompting criticism about insufficient anomaly detection and billing safeguards.