Microsoft eyes $600M Copilot savings by swapping in Kimi K3 amid AI-policy headwinds

Microsoft is evaluating Moonshot’s open-source Kimi K3 to power Copilot and Azure, aiming to save as much as $600 million in inference costs by moving away from OpenAI/Anthropic. Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter, multi-modal model optimized for data-center hardware with a very large context window, but its per-task cost remains higher than some rivals. The move comes as US policy discussions—potentially under a Trump administration—could restrict Chinese open-source AI models, adding political risk to deployment plans.