Moonshot AI is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon and Google to put Kimi K3 on their cloud platforms, and is asking for as much as 30 percent of the revenue those services generate, according to three people familiar with the talks. The discussions are at an early stage and may not produce agreements. A deal would be the first substantial revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI developer and a major US cloud provider.
Moonshot has a contractual reason to expect a share. When it published K3’s weights in July, it did so under a custom license that permits almost any use, with one condition attached to model-as-a-service operators. Any licensee whose own revenue, combined with its affiliates’, exceeds $20 million over any consecutive 12 months has to sign a separate agreement with Moonshot before using the model commercially. The threshold counts total revenue rather than revenue from K3, which puts every hyperscaler past it.
The clouds are also where the customers are. K3 is a mixture-of-experts model that activates 104 billion parameters per token out of 2.8 trillion, and while the weights are free to download, analysts expect few enterprises to stand up that much hardware when a provider already has it. Moonshot has struck revenue-sharing deals with smaller platforms; the Chinese IT services firm Chinasoft International disclosed one in July without giving terms.
What is unsettled is mostly mechanical. The parties have not agreed how revenue would be divided, what data access Moonshot would receive, or how token usage would be audited. Usage-based billing makes token counts the unit of account, so the auditing question determines what any percentage is a percentage of.
Washington has been moving the other way. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on July 22 that “open source is not open season on American IP,” and warned that covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks by Chinese firms would put “sanctions and Entity List designations” on the table. He posted it the same day the White House accused Moonshot of distilling Anthropic’s Fable to build K3 and of obtaining Nvidia GB300 servers in breach of export controls. An Entity List designation would bar US firms from supplying Moonshot with chips, software or cloud services without a license, which is the category of service now being negotiated. Moonshot rejects the distillation charge, telling China’s National Business Daily last month that K3’s gains came from changes to the model’s underlying architecture.
The model itself has held up in outside testing. Arena.ai ranks it first on a benchmark for building web interfaces, and Artificial Analysis rates it level with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 on complex multi-step tasks, close to the near-frontier results Moonshot published at launch.
Moonshot did not respond to a request for comment. Microsoft, Google and AWS declined to comment. The company was founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, raised more than $2 billion in May, and is preparing a possible Hong Kong listing. Alibaba, one of its investors, is pursuing revenue-sharing agreements of its own with large users of its newest open-source model.
Sources: Jerusalem Post, Hugging Face
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team