Over the past month, Moonshot AI has been involved in two different processes in the United States. One concerned policy: on July 22, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the department is considering placing the company on a trade blacklist. Furthermore, tech official Michael Kracios accused the company of creating Kimi K3 based on Anthropic's Fable and obtaining Nvidia GB300 servers. Moonshot rejected these claims, stating that K3's success is due to its proprietary architectural developments.
The second process relates to business. According to a Reuters report from August 26, Moonshot is holding separate negotiations with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google regarding the deployment of Kimi K3 on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud platforms. The company hopes to secure up to 30% of the revenue generated by K3-related services across these three cloud services. The conclusion of such a deal would mark the first major revenue-sharing agreement between a Chinese AI company and leading American cloud providers.
These negotiations reflect a broader trend. Chinese open models have entered US corporate channels for the first time through partners such as IBM. Models derived from DeepSeek are featured in this company's watsonx.ai catalog, and its recent $240 million agreement with Together AI includes DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax in its model lineup.
The second phase of Kimi's development is not just about market entry but also about defining the profit distribution mechanism after integration. The Kimi K3 model is an open model with 2.8 trillion parameters, which requires significant computational resources. Moonshot recommends using clusters of 64 or more accelerators, which stimulates large-scale consumption of services in cloud environments. The model license already establishes commercial frameworks: any company and its affiliates using the model in a model-as-a-service mode and generating over $20 million in annual revenue in the last 12 months must enter into a separate agreement before commencing commercial use.
According to analysis provided by Reuters, the model's capabilities are comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, with an advertised cost approximately one-third of Anthropic's Fable. In addition to the joint innovation and token revenue-sharing agreement signed on July 20 with ChineseSoft, the cloud agreement will provide Moonshot with a revenue stream that will grow with international usage. This is important in the context of the company preparing for an IPO with an estimated valuation of up to $50 billion, as well as while Alibaba considers a similar revenue-sharing model for its next open model, Qwen.