Kimi 2.6 had the same janky license: https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6/blob/main/LICENS... - looks like they've been doing that at least as far back as K2.
The models they released in 2025 - https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/models - were clean MIT. They started doing the "modified MIT" thing in January 2026 with moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Thinking
In what way was the license "janky"? Moonshot isn't a trillion dollar US behemoth. If these terms allow it to release near frontier models with open weights, so startups and anyone with enough hardware can use them, while charging only companies with more than $20 million in revenue or 100 million users, that seems like a reasonable trade off.
To be clear, the restriction on "Model as a Service" past $20M yearly revenue is new to K3. K2.x had the attribution requirement for any commercial use with more than $20M monthly revenue.