BEIJING/SINGAPORE: Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI is seeking up to a 30 percent share of revenue from Kimi K3-related services as it negotiates agreements with Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet's Google that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its flagship AI model.

Three people familiar with the discussions said Moonshot is in talks with Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Any agreement could mark the first major revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI company and a major U.S. cloud provider.

The discussions are in the early stages, and sources said there is no certainty they will result in agreements. They declined to be identified because the talks are private.

Moonshot, Microsoft, Google and AWS declined to comment.

The negotiations come as Chinese AI models, which are often cheaper than Western offerings, gain traction in the United States despite tensions between Washington and Beijing over artificial intelligence and U.S. restrictions on exports of AI chips to China.

The terms Moonshot is seeking would align with those the startup has outlined for major customers using its open-weight model, according to sources.

One person said unresolved issues in the negotiations include how revenue would be divided, access to data, and auditing the use of tokens, which are units of text processed by AI models and are used to calculate revenue under usage-based billing.

Moonshot has also faced criticism from U.S. officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month that he might add the company to a trade blacklist.

U.S. officials have accused the Beijing-based company of stealing from Anthropic's Fable model to help create Kimi K3 and of illegally acquiring Nvidia chips.

Moonshot has rejected suggestions that Kimi K3's performance was achieved through distillation, telling China's National Business Daily last month that its performance gains resulted from original changes to the model's underlying architecture.

Kimi K3 is an open-weight model that can be downloaded and modified. However, analysts say few customers are likely to operate a system with 2.8 trillion parameters on their own infrastructure because of the high computing costs involved.

The company has already signed similar agreements with some smaller cloud platforms, the sources said, without providing details.

Chinese IT services provider Chinasoft International said in July that it had a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot, although it did not disclose how the revenue would be divided.

Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained AI researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is backed by several Chinese technology companies, including Alibaba.

The startup raised more than US$2 billion in May and is preparing for a potential Hong Kong listing, according to sources. Alibaba is also seeking revenue-sharing agreements with major users of its new open-source AI model, sources have said.