China's Moonshot in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, Google over K3 revenue sharing

China's ambitious AI startup, Moonshot, is engaging in preliminary discussions with tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google over revenue-sharing deals for its cutting-edge K3 model, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. If successful, these agreements could mark the first significant revenue-sharing partnerships between a Chinese AI firm and major US cloud providers.

This development highlights the growing global traction of China's AI models, despite US national security concerns that have led to restrictions on AI chip exports to China. Moonshot is reportedly seeking up to a 30% revenue share from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud. The startup estimates that its open-weight model could generate substantial revenue due to its impressive performance, ranking first in web interface-building capabilities and delivering performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 in complex, multi-step tasks.

While the talks are still in their early stages, potential issues include revenue splitting, data access, and auditing token usage. Moonshot's leadership has rejected allegations that its K3 model was created through model distillation or the illegal acquisition of Nvidia chips, insisting that performance gains resulted from original architectural changes.