Kimi K3 License Suddenly Tightened, Goldman Sachs Says China's Open Source Model Will Bid Farewell to Total Free-of-Charge

According to Omdia Beating monitoring, Ronald Keung, the Head of Goldman Sachs Asia Internet Research, believes that Chinese AI companies may no longer offer model weights completely for free in the future, but instead charge commercial licensing fees to cloud platforms and large API service providers.

The use of Chinese models overseas has been rapidly increasing, but most of the revenue has been flowing to the platforms responsible for deployment and selling APIs. Model companies have opened up their weights but have struggled to monetize them from subsequent calls.

Following last night's full weight release of Kimi K3, this change has already occurred. Regular users can still download, deploy, and fine-tune for free, but large MaaS providers with annual revenue exceeding $20 million must now sign a separate agreement with the Dark Side of the Moon.

This restriction is a new addition to K3. K2 also had a $20 million threshold, but at that time, it only required large product-labeling models to include the model name without the need for a separate commercial agreement.