Moonshot AI Seeks Revenue Deals With US Cloud Giants

Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup, is in early-stage negotiations with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google to host its Kimi K3 AI model on their cloud platforms. The company is seeking revenue-sharing agreements that would grant it up to 30% of the income generated from K3-related services on Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud.

These talks proceed amid significant tension with the United States government. U.S. officials have accused the startup of stealing technology from Anthropic's Fable model and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips to develop Kimi K3. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has indicated that the company could be added to a trade blacklist due to these national security concerns.

Moonshot AI denies the allegations, stating that the performance of Kimi K3 is the result of original architectural changes. Third-party evaluations have compared the model's capabilities to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8. Current negotiations remain unresolved regarding token usage auditing, data access, and the final revenue split.