Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are reportedly in early talks with China’s Moonshot AI over revenue-sharing deals for its Kimi K3 model, weeks after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he might add the company to a U.S. trade blacklist.
Moonshot is seeking as much as 30% of revenue generated by K3-related services running on Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to Reuters. The talks are preliminary and may not produce agreements.
The striking part isn’t the revenue-sharing model itself. Three of the largest U.S. technology companies may be building a direct commercial relationship with a Chinese developer that Washington has accused of taking American technology.
Bessent Threatens the Very Relationships Moonshot Needs
Bessent warned last month that Chinese AI developers could face sanctions and Entity List designations over what he called industrial-scale distillation attacks on U.S. models.
