Moonshot AI negotiates revenue-sharing deals with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google for K3 model

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is negotiating early-stage revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model on their cloud platforms. Moonshot AI seeks up to a 30% revenue share, which would mark a historic first for a Chinese AI firm on major U.S. clouds. However, the talks face hurdles over data access and token auditing, alongside intense geopolitical friction as U.S. officials accuse Moonshot AI of chip smuggling and IP theft.

Moonshot AI revenue-sharing negotiations

• ▪Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is seeking up to a 30 percent share of revenue generated from Kimi K3-related services on Microsoft, Amazon, and Google cloud platforms
• ▪Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google to host its Kimi K3 model on their respective cloud platforms
• ▪Moonshot AI has signed revenue-sharing agreements with smaller cloud platforms, including a July 2026 agreement with Chinese IT services provider Chinasoft International
• ▪Negotiations between Moonshot AI and U.S. cloud providers remain in early stages, with unresolved issues including revenue split, data access, and auditing token usage

US-China AI trade tensions

• ▪In July 2026, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that he might add Beijing-based Moonshot AI to a trade blacklist
• ▪U.S. officials have accused Beijing-based Moonshot AI of illegally acquiring Nvidia chips despite Washington's national security bans on exporting AI chips to China

Kimi K3 model performance

• ▪Benchmark platform Arena.ai ranked Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model first in an evaluation assessing web interface-building capabilities
• ▪Analysis firm Artificial Analysis reported that Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 delivers performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on complex, multi-step tasks

Cloud platform enterprise adoption

• ▪Founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin and backed by Alibaba, Moonshot AI raised over $2 billion in May 2026 and is preparing for a potential Hong Kong listing
• ▪Analysts state that few customers are likely to run Moonshot AI's open-weight Kimi K3 model on their own infrastructure due to the high computing costs of its 2.8 trillion parameters
• ▪Chinese technology giant Alibaba is seeking revenue-sharing agreements with major users of its own new open-source artificial intelligence model

Distillation theft allegations

• ▪U.S. officials have accused Moonshot AI of stealing from Anthropic's sophisticated model, Fable, to help create the Kimi K3 model
• ▪Moonshot AI rejected allegations of model distillation, telling China's National Business Daily in July 2026 that Kimi K3's performance gains came from original architectural changes

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