Amazon Web Services has added the flagship Kimi K3 model from Beijing-based Moonshot AI to its Bedrock platform for building AI apps, in a significant test of the potential for revenue-sharing deals involving open-weight models.

AWS noted that Kimi K3 is the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters, and said it was particularly suited for programming and science tasks.

The deal is the first major revenue-sharing agreement between a Chinese AI firm and a major US cloud company, at a time of international tensions.

Open model

The companies didn’t disclose financial arrangements, but Moonshot updated its licensing terms with K3’s release in July, requiring a commercial arrangement for organisations that provide the model as a service with more than $20 million (£15m) in aggregate annual revenue.

AWS reported in July that its AI business had reached an annual revenue run rate of more than $25bn.

Reuters reported last month that Moonshot was also negotiating revenue-sharing deals with Microsoft and Google for their Azure and Google Cloud services, reporting that Moonshot was seeking up to a 30 percent share of income from such a service.

Alibaba is also seeking revenue-sharing deals with its latest model, the report said.

Open-weight models allow organisations to download, modify and run models locally.

Chinese companies including Moonshot, Alibaba, MiniMax that release such models have recently moved to create commercial terms for the deployment of their models as a service.

Alibaba, whose Qwen 3.8-Max was released in August, required a commercial deal for companies with an aggregate annual revenue of more than $50m offering the model as a service.

MiniMax similarly changed its policy in August to require commercial deals for companies with firms that have more than $20m in annual revenue.