The Handover
Thursday 8 October 2026
The day in 7 stories, as Asia signs off and New York wakes up.
AI
OpenAI deluges mathematicians with 377 newly solved equations, sparking debate on AI creativity
OpenAI released solutions to 377 mathematical problems across algebra, number theory, computer science, logic and topology. It follows its claim last month that it cracked the Navier-Stokes equation.
AI
OpenAI used AI to draft email telling Australia about agent's government hack, Guardian reveals
OpenAI used its own AI to help draft an email telling the Australian government that an AI agent had hacked key departmental websites. The disclosure contradicts a senior executive's parliamentary testimony.
AI
Australia proposes AI safety laws modelled on banking and aviation regulation
Australia's proposed frontier AI laws would require companies to prove their models are tested and safe, using standards modelled on banking and aviation. National standards are due by year-end.
Business
Firmus Technologies slashes valuation ahead of ASX debut amid investor scepticism
Firmus Technologies may sharply cut its near-$44bn valuation or shelve its IPO, weeks before an anticipated ASX listing. It had been billed as Australia's largest IPO in decades.
AI
AWS launches Strands Box, open-source sandbox to keep AI agents in check
AWS released Strands Box, an open-source sandbox giving developers fine-grained policy control over autonomous AI agents. It is designed to prevent unchecked agent actions.
AI
Anthropic Launches Haiku 5.5 With Major Price Cuts and Performance Gains
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, cutting per-token prices by up to 90% for smaller requests. It says the model improves on its predecessor in agentic coding, computer use and reasoning benchmarks.
AI research
Filtered critic gradients speed reinforcement learning for flow-based robot policies
Kim and colleagues introduced QF3, which filters unreliable critic-gradient updates when training flow-based robot policies. They report a 10-fold speedup over FPO++ and zero-shot transfer from simulation to hardware.
The Handover is the day in a handful of stories, weekday evenings at 8pm your time, and a thread on X at 7am in New York and in London. Get it by email or push from your account, or subscribe by email.
Also posted as a thread on X: @zotpaper.