Kimi K3 just made open-source AI a little less free — and Goldman Sachs thinks it's a preview of what's next.
Ronald Keung, Goldman Sachs' head of Asia internet research, argues that Chinese AI companies may stop releasing model weights entirely for free. Instead, they'll charge commercial licensing fees to cloud platforms and large API providers.
Chinese models have seen rapid growth in overseas usage, but most of the revenue flows to the platforms that deploy and sell the APIs. The model companies open up their weights, yet struggle to earn a cut from the subsequent calls.
Kimi K3, which released its full weights last night, is already showing the shift. Regular users can still download, deploy, and fine-tune the model for free. But large MaaS (model-as-a-service) providers with annual revenue over $20 million will need to sign a separate agreement with Moonshot AI first…