What is known about Moonshot AI’s early-stage negotiations with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its open-weight Kimi K3 model—including the proposed revenue-sharing terms, unresolved issues, lack of certainty and official responses, the significance of a potential deal amid

Moonshot AI is reportedly in preliminary discussions with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud to offer its open-weight Kimi K3 model on their platforms. No agreement is confirmed: the reporting rests on anonymous sources, Moonshot did not respond, and Microsoft, Google, and AWS declined comment. 1

Reported deal terms and open questions

• Moonshot is said to be seeking up to 30% of revenue from K3-related services sold through those clouds—consistent with terms reportedly contemplated for other major K3 users. 12
• Critical terms remain unresolved: the precise revenue split, the cloud providers’ and Moonshot’s access to customer/model data, and token-usage auditing. Token measurement matters because usage-based AI billing determines the revenue to be shared. 1
• The discussions are explicitly described as early-stage, and there is no certainty that any transaction will result. 1

Why a deal would matter

• If concluded, it could be the first major revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI company and a major U.S. cloud provider. 1
• It would also be notable amid U.S.–China AI tensions, including U.S. national-security concerns that have contributed to restrictions on AI-chip exports to China. 1
• For Moonshot, hyperscale-cloud distribution is a practical route to enterprise customers. Although K3’s weights are downloadable and modifiable, few organizations are likely to self-host a roughly 2.8-trillion-parameter system because of its substantial computing cost. 14

Security and provenance controversy

• U.S. officials have accused Moonshot of using Anthropic’s advanced Fable model in creating K3 and of illegally obtaining Nvidia chips; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had said he might add Moonshot to a trade blacklist. 1
• Moonshot rejected the suggestion that K3’s results were obtained through distillation, telling China’s National Business Daily that its performance gains resulted from original architectural changes. 1
• These are allegations and a company rebuttal, not an established adjudicated finding in the cited reporting. 1

Kimi K3 and commercial context

• Moonshot launched Kimi K3 in July as an open-weight model with about 2.8 trillion parameters, described as designed for frontier intelligence. 34
• Reuters reported strong third-party results: Arena.ai ranked K3 first for web-interface-building capability, while Artificial Analysis found performance comparable to OpenAI GPT-5.5 and Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8, especially on complex, multistep tasks. 1
• Moonshot was founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained researcher Yang Zhilin and is backed by Chinese technology companies including Alibaba. It reportedly raised more than $2 billion in May and is preparing for a possible Hong Kong listing. 1
• Alibaba is separately reported to be pursuing revenue-sharing arrangements with major users of its own new open-source AI model—suggesting a broader Chinese-model-provider effort to monetize open-weight systems through large-scale commercial distribution. 12