Moonshot AI Seeks Revenue-Sharing Deals with Microsoft, Amazon, Google
China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model. The talks are at an early stage, but a deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major US cloud company.
Kimi K3 has posted strong results in third-party evaluations, including ranking first in web interface-building capabilities and delivering performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on complex tasks.
Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on the three cloud platforms, according to sources who declined to be identified. The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models are gaining traction in the US, despite national security concerns and bans on exports of AI chips.
Moonshot has come under fire from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said he might add it to a trade blacklist due to allegations that Kimi K3 was built by stealing from Anthropic's most sophisticated model, Fable. Moonshot has rejected these suggestions and claims its performance gains came from original changes to underlying architecture.