I didn't dig into Kimi's MaaS legalese, but i dont really understand how that knee-high fence is supposed to work long term.

All the service provider needs to do is provide the option to rent out VM's with access to the inference cards.

Have the customer provide the model.

Maybe provide a bit of a speedup, by letting the customer mount the model by hash.

Sure, that all sounded way too technical 10 years ago, and somebody would have said that's already too much annoyance to deal with for average customers.

Reluctantly i'd agree.

That was 10 years ago. Nowadays, with some proper docs, this entire set up can be up and running in 5 minutes.