Moonshot AI is holding revenue-sharing talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google, Reuters reported on Aug. 26.

Open source is often seen as free, but that is not always the case. Moonshot's Kimi K3 licence includes a provision requiring a separate commercial agreement with Moonshot if the model is offered as a paid service and generates more than $20 million in annual revenue.

The talks would allow U.S. cloud companies to host Moonshot AI's large model Kimi K3, the report said. If a deal is reached, it would be the first large-scale revenue-sharing case between a Chinese AI company and major U.S. cloud companies, Reuters reported.

Chinese AI models are cheaper than U.S. products and are expanding their share in the U.S. market. The U.S. government has restricted exports of AI chips to China for national security reasons, but has been unable to stop Chinese AI models from spreading locally.

Moonshot AI is seeking up to 30 percent of K3-related service revenue generated by Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, sources said. That is at the same level as terms it has offered to large customers using the open-weight model. The negotiations are at an early stage and whether they will lead to an agreement is uncertain. Issues such as the revenue-sharing structure, data access rights and audits of token usage remain unresolved, Reuters reported.

Moonshot AI has also recently faced pressure from the U.S. government. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (스콧 베센트) said last month Moonshot AI could be added to a trade blacklist. U.S. government officials have alleged Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's top-performing model Fable and used it to develop Kimi K3, and obtained Nvidia chips illegally. Moonshot AI has denied the allegations and said improvements in Kimi K3's performance came from its own architecture enhancements.

Kimi K3 received high marks in external evaluations, Reuters reported. Arena.AI ranked Kimi K3 first in a benchmark assessing the ability to build web interfaces. Artificial Analysis said Kimi K3 performed similarly to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 in tests of complex multi-step tasks.

Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon University researcher Zhilin Yang (양즈린) and has also received backing from Chinese big tech companies including Alibaba. It raised more than $2 billion in funding in May and is preparing for a Hong Kong stock market listing.