Chinese AI firms shift from cheap models to revenue sharing

Alibaba and Moonshot are keeping models widely available while seeking fees from cloud companies that build businesses on top of them.

Chinese AI companies are moving away from rock-bottom API pricing and toward revenue-sharing deals with large cloud providers, Bloomberg reported.

Alibaba and Moonshot are pursuing a model that keeps their systems broadly available while charging companies once commercial use reaches a specified scale.

Moonshot is reportedly discussing revenue-sharing agreements with Amazon, Microsoft and Google for its Kimi K3 model.

Under the reported terms, companies using Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max could owe fees after generating $50 million in model-as-a-service revenue over 12 consecutive months, while Moonshot’s threshold for Kimi K3 is $20 million.

The licensing approach still allows users to download, customize and build products with the models at little or no cost. Bloomberg said the strategy could help Chinese labs monetize popular models without restricting access for startups, students and individual developers.

Chinese AI models remain far cheaper than comparable offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, but the companies face risks including possible US restrictions and resistance from cloud providers to paying model fees.

The shift follows a period in which Chinese labs used low prices and open-weight distribution to gain market share. Bloomberg said the new revenue strategy is intended to turn that usage into a larger commercial business.

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