The Handover

Friday 23 October 2026

The day in 7 stories, as Asia signs off and New York wakes up.

1. Health & Medicine

   Doctors hail personalised melanoma vaccine as investors sell off on trial data

   Merck and Moderna say their personalised mRNA melanoma vaccine cut the risk of death or recurrence by 42% in a late-stage trial. The reduction was measured against standard treatment.

2. Business

   OpenAI targets $30bn round at $1.25tn valuation, seeks signatures by end of next week

   OpenAI is nearing a funding round of up to $30bn at a $1.25tn pre-money valuation, CNBC reports. It aims to secure signatures by the end of next week, with final terms still under negotiation.

3. AI

   OpenAI makes Decisions API available to all customers, stepping into the decision model race

   OpenAI opened its Decisions API to all customers, offering fast, low-cost AI classification. Some newcomers in the market already outrank its model on public benchmarks.

4. Security

   ABC and Critical Infrastructure Targeted in Spyware Campaign Weaponising Online Ads

   Australia's ABC confirmed it was among more than two dozen Australian organisations targeted in a spyware campaign. Citizen Lab says Israel-based Discover-Tech delivered spyware through online ads merely viewed on devices.

5. Geopolitics

   Australia Sanctions North Korean 'Shadow Bankers' Over Fraudulent IT Worker Scheme

   Australia sanctioned two North Korean companies and two people accused of running a fraudulent IT worker network. The scheme allegedly funds Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program while bypassing UN sanctions.

6. AI research

   A simulator predicts when detectable reward hacking will dominate training

   Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Google Research used SimHack to forecast reward hacking in AI coding training. Median onset predictions had 11.3% relative error on unseen training recipes.