Moonshot is negotiating with microsoft, amazon, and google for up to 30 percent of revenue from…
moonshot is negotiating with microsoft, amazon, and google for up to 30 percent of revenue from hosted kimi k3, turning open weights into a royalty stream for the first time. the kimi k3 license already forces model-as-a-service businesses past 20 million in yearly revenue into separate commercial deals.
open source AI just got a pricing model, and nobody agreed on it.
Context
A Reuters exclusive of 26 August 2026, citing three people familiar with the talks, says Moonshot is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over K3 revenue sharing, seeking up to a 30% share of K3-related revenue on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. It says the talks are at an early stage with no certainty they will result in agreements, and that the revenue split, data access and token auditing are unresolved. The Kimi K3 license says that if a licensee or its affiliates run a Model as a Service business above a stated revenue threshold over 12 months, they must enter a separate agreement with Moonshot before commercial use.
The status is talks, not an agreement, and the 30% is a sourced ask, not a result. Reuters relies on anonymous sources. The license's exact currency and period wording continues beyond what is quoted here, so the 20 million threshold should be read from the license itself and was not paraphrased. No evidence that the status changed by the note's date was found. US officials' distillation accusations, which Moonshot denies, are background in the Reuters piece only.
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- Any announced cloud listing or agreement.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 21:33 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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