China's Moonshot AI is seeking a revenue cut from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google

China's AI startup, Moonshot AI, is engaging in negotiations with major U.S. cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to share revenue generated by its flagship AI model, Kimi K3. These talks, according to sources familiar with the situation, could potentially mark the first significant revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI firm and a prominent U.S. cloud company.

The discussions come at a time when China's top AI models are gaining popularity in the U.S., despite ongoing security concerns that have resulted in bans on AI chip exports to China. Moonshot is aiming for a 30% revenue share from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud, a percentage that aligns with the startup's previous conversation terms with major customers.

At the early stages, these negotiations are not guaranteed to lead to agreements. The startup has faced criticism from U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has suggested the possibility of adding Moonshot to a trade blacklist. The company has denied allegations of stealing from Anthropic's Fable model and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips, stating that its performance enhancements are due to original architectural changes.

Key sticking points in the negotiations include the revenue split, data access, and auditing token usage, with tokens being the units of text processed by AI models, crucial for revenue calculations under usage-based billing. Despite strong performance in third-party evaluations, where Kimi K3 ranked first in web interface-building capabilities and delivered performance comparable to GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8, few customers are expected to run the model themselves due to the high computational costs.

Moonshot has already established similar revenue-sharing agreements with smaller cloud platforms, though specifics have not been disclosed. The startup, founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, has received over $2 billion in funding and is preparing for a potential listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.