The K3 license is not MIT; it sets gates by revenue line. Running K3 as MaaS with revenue above USD 20 million over 12 consecutive months requires a separate agreement with Moonshot AI first; a product above 100 million monthly active users or USD 20 million in monthly revenue must display "Kimi K3" in its interface (the entry listed no source line; not independently recovered).
The mainstream reading is that open source means cheap and free to use. The diary's call is that "open source" released the weights and kept the pricing power, and the mechanism sits in the license: whoever reaches scale on the weights comes back to pay the toll. Customer contracts carry a second layer, the data-routing question raised by the distillation allegations, which are unproven.
Moonshot AI released the K3 weights in July 2026; 11 days before that, the official API output price went from ¥27 to ¥100 per million tokens, about 3.7 times (the entry listed no source line; not independently recovered). The weights are about 1.56TB, so self-hosting needs a multi-node cluster. Anthropic's September report alleges Moonshot silently forwarded user requests to Claude; all of it rests on Anthropic's internal logs, unaudited. Amazon listed Kimi K3 on Bedrock on 9/18.
For founders: treat USD 20 million in revenue as the license renegotiation point and open talks a year ahead, before the trigger; state in customer contracts who the replies come from and where the data goes. For investors: ask one diligence question, how much of this company's value disappears if the base model is swapped.