Reserve Bank hikes to 4.85 per cent

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 06:00:00 +1100

Money got dearer on Melbourne Cup day, and the AI bill got harder to ignore. The Reserve Bank hiked, token thieves are running up other people's tabs, and Canva is hunting for cheaper models.

1Reserve Bank hikes to 4.85 per cent

The Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.85 per cent on Tuesday, its fifth rise this year and the highest level since 2008. The board split 6-3, with three members wanting to hold, and Governor Michele Bullock said the hike is "what's needed to get inflation down". The board now expects headline inflation to end 2026 at 4.5 per cent, up from the 3.6 per cent it forecast three months ago. Canstar puts the extra cost on a A$600,000 mortgage at about A$456 a month since the start of the year, and that comes out of the same household budgets that pay for software subscriptions.

2Stolen AI keys are draining cloud budgets

Criminals who steal large language model (LLM) API keys can run up more than US$100,000 a day in charges on the victim's account, Google's Mandiant responders report, and some companies hit US$1 million before they cut the access. The tactic, called LLMjacking, has grown steadily for two years. In one case an intruder made more than 500,000 API calls in under eight hours to power Jet Night, a token reseller charging about US$60 a month for a plan Google says would normally cost US$100 to US$250. Google's recommended fix: build your own defensive agent swarm... kidding, it's the ever-reliable advice to rotate keys from a central secrets manager, keep permissions tight and scan your code for leaked secrets.

3Canva leans on OpenAI to cut costs

Four days after launching Brush, its second home-grown model, Canva has expanded its OpenAI partnership for broader access to GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6, and the two will work on making those models cheaper to run. Canva says Brush is up to 69 per cent faster than its previous design agent and 46 per cent cheaper per edit. Back in August, Melanie Perkins said Canva was "relying too heavily on frontier models" and cut its revenue growth forecast from 30 to 20 per cent. Now it's working the AI bill from both ends: build its own models where it can, and make OpenAI's cheaper where it can't.

Quick Bites

Westpac says AI cut its St.George data warehouse migration from a budgeted A$70 million to about A$35 million and pulled the finish forward by more than two years.
Google took Dreambeans, its AI story app, to India, its first market outside the US, with 13 local languages.
Apple reported record September-quarter revenue of US$114.5 billion, up 12 per cent, and US$479 billion for the full fiscal year.
South Korea's president proposed US$15.97 billion for AI in the 2027 budget, nearly twice this year's, across chips, AI for robots and machines, and AI data centres.
Germany's federal cybersecurity office says members of parliament got Apple warnings that they may have been targeted by spyware, part of a batch Apple sent to users in 99 countries.

One to Watch

The Reserve Bank's next rate decision is on 8 December, and three of its nine board members already wanted to hold this time.