Moonshot AI Seeks Revenue-Sharing Deal with US Tech Giants

China's Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its Kimi K3 model on their platforms. The negotiations are at an early stage, but if successful, it would be the first major revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and leading U.S. cloud companies.

Moonshot is seeking up to 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on these platforms. This aligns with terms outlined for major customers using the open-weight model. However, key sticking points include determining revenue split, data access, and auditing token usage for the hosted AI services.

The discussions come amidst U.S. government scrutiny, including accusations of IP theft via distillation from Anthropic's Fable and potential trade blacklist action. Moonshot has rejected these claims, stating that Kimi K3's performance gains came from original changes to underlying architecture.