Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based startup behind the Kimi chatbot, is in early talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over revenue-sharing agreements that would let their cloud platforms host its Kimi K3 model, according to people familiar with the discussions cited by Reuters. Moonshot is seeking as much as 30% of the revenue Azure, AWS and Google Cloud would generate from services built on K3 — terms that, if agreed, would mark one of the first significant revenue-sharing arrangements between a Chinese AI developer and a major U.S. cloud provider.
The talks remain preliminary and may not produce agreements. Unresolved issues reportedly include the exact revenue split, what access to usage data each side would get, and how token consumption — the unit that determines usage-based pricing — would be audited. Moonshot has already struck a smaller-scale revenue-sharing deal with Chinasoft International, a Chinese IT services firm, though financial terms of that arrangement were not disclosed.
A model built amid distillation allegations
Kimi K3, which Moonshot open-sourced in July, has drawn strong third-party marks: Artificial Analysis rated its capabilities comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, and Arena.ai ranked it highest among tested models for building web interfaces. That performance is precisely what has drawn U.S. scrutiny. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has alleged that Moonshot built K3 in part by distilling Anthropic's Fable model through a large-scale, deliberately obfuscated pipeline, and that the company accessed export-restricted Nvidia GB300 systems through servers in Thailand. Moonshot has denied the allegations, attributing K3's capabilities to what it calls “novel architectural innovations.”
When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table.
Scott Bessent, U.S. Treasury Secretary, via TechCrunch
That backdrop makes a hosting deal with three of the largest American cloud companies notable regardless of whether it closes. Moonshot is separately seeking a pre-IPO valuation of roughly $50 billion and told investors it had reached about $300 million in annualized revenue by June, according to Reuters' reporting. A revenue-sharing pact would give the startup distribution through infrastructure it does not have to build itself, while handing Microsoft, Amazon and Google a foothold in offering one of the more capable open-weight models on the market — at a moment when Washington has not settled the question of how freely U.S. cloud infrastructure should be extended to Chinese-developed AI.