Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup, is in advanced discussions with Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet’s Google over revenue-sharing terms for its Kimi K3 large language model, according to people familiar with the matter.
The startup is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services deployed on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, the sources said. Moonshot, founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained AI researcher Yang Zhilin, has raised more than $2 billion since its last funding round in May.
The negotiations center on commercial terms for K3, an open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters. Moonshot has not disclosed whether the talks include data access or token-usage auditing provisions. The company is also preparing for a potential listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the sources added.
Moonshot’s push for higher revenue shares comes amid heightened scrutiny from U.S. regulators. Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Treasury might add Moonshot to a trade blacklist, though no formal action has been taken. Moonshot has denied allegations that it illegally acquired Nvidia chips or used model distillation techniques to develop K3, calling such claims baseless.
In July, Chinese IT services provider Chinasoft International announced a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot, though financial terms were not disclosed. Separately, Moonshot has faced accusations from U.S. officials that it replicated aspects of Anthropic’s Fable model in K3, a charge the company has rejected.
Independent evaluations have ranked K3 highly. On Arena.ai, it placed first in a benchmark assessing web interface-building capabilities, while Artificial Analysis reported performance comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 on complex, multi-step tasks. Moonshot has attributed its progress to architectural improvements rather than model distillation.
