Chinese AI has found its way into the U.S.: Microsoft, Google, and AWS may start selling rights to Kimi K3 models

At a political level, cooperation between the United States and China in the field of artificial intelligence development is not absolutely welcomed, but commercial interests often trump national security considerations, so Chinese startup Moonshot AI began talks with Microsoft, AWS, and Google about the possibility of hosting its Kimi K3 model in their cloud infrastructure.

Image source: AWS

As clarified, such agreement between the parties means ReutersThe US cloud giant deducts up to 30% of revenue from providing customers with access to Chinese developer Kimi K3. It is worth noting that this is not only the first time that Chinese and American companies have discussed such cooperation options, but also an interesting precedent in the context of criticism of Moonshot AI by some US officials. For example, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said last month that he might add Moonshot AI to a list of foreign companies banned from exporting from the United States. Local officials believe that China’s artificial intelligence model Kimi K3 may have been obtained by refining the development of American Anthropic. Moonshot AI rejects such accusations and explains its model’s performance improvements through successful choices in basic architecture.

The Chinese startup’s revenue-sharing plan is generally consistent with the principles it follows when interacting with customers who host its artificial intelligence models on its own infrastructure. According to Reuters , talks between Moonshot AI and the U.S. cloud giant have now come down to nuances over revenue sharing plans, data access, and the use of monitoring tokens. For artificial intelligence model suppliers, cooperation with cloud vendors is the main driver of adoption in the enterprise sector, so this area is very sensitive for Moonshot AI.

Although Kimi K3 has open weights, launching a 2.8 trillion parameter model is not suitable for all clients because proportional use of hardware resources will be very expensive. Therefore, relationships with cloud providers are important to Moonshot AI’s business and its customers. The Chinese startup has struck similar deals with smaller players in the cloud space. At least China’s ChinaSoft International is among them. Moonshot AI is financially backed by Alibaba Holdings, and it is also considering the possibility of using similar principles for sharing revenue with customers when distributing the Qwen family’s own AI models.