Microsoft, Amazon, Google Weigh Revenue-Sharing Deals with China's Moonshot AI

Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are in talks with China's Moonshot AI to establish revenue-sharing deals for its Kimi K3 model. The potential agreements could see the US tech giants share up to 30% of the revenue generated by K3-related services running on their respective cloud platforms.

The talks come despite Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning that Chinese AI developers, including Moonshot, could face sanctions and Entity List designations over alleged 'industrial-scale distillation attacks' on US models. Moonshot has denied these claims, stating that K3's gains came from original changes to its underlying architecture.

The interest in Kimi K3 is commercial, with analysts noting that the model's computing costs make it impractical for most customers to run themselves. This creates a revenue opportunity for the hyperscalers, which can sell access to the highly competitive model over infrastructure they already operate, while sharing a portion of the resulting revenue with Moonshot.

Analysts rate K3 alongside OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8. Prediction-market traders still see a path for Moonshot to reach the top, with an 11% chance of holding the world's No. 1-ranked AI model by December 31.