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The software engine underpinning GitHub Copilot and a growing number of Microsoft products is now written entirely in Rust, with AI agents doing most of the porting work. The migration cost about $120,000 in AI token usage plus about three weeks of a developer's time. However, managers also had to grapple with a few dozen regressions in the resulting code, pointing to AI’s ongoing challenges in understanding Rust. The effort updated the runtime module-by-module until the job was completed, spanning over 135 releases across a 14.5-week time period. Roughly 1.3 port pull requests were opened per day. Overall, agents converted 430,000 lines of TypeScript into 800,000 lines of production Rust. To keep the port as simple as possible, the port only replaced TypeScript modules on a case-by-case basis. It didn’t look to optimize the structure of the runtime itself. That work is next. And Rust, known for its lean performance, did not disappoint. One benchmark measured how quickly the runtime could complete 1,000 one-turn session lifecycles, using a shared client and 100 concurrent pipelines. The original TypeScript implementation completed 7.55 of those lifecycles per second, while Rust running in-process managed 120 per second - representing a 15.9x speedup on that particular workload. In terms of memory, a 10-client batch of agents consumed 1,383 MB with TypeScript while the Rust rewrite consumed only 126 MB serving the same swarm. Within Rust, the work remained in-process instead of spawning external background processes for completion, a requirement for TypeScript. Copilot from VS Code to Microsoft Office At first glance, most users may not know how pervasive the Copilot runtime is. It backs the GitHub Copilot command-line interface (CLI), the Copilot app, the SDK and the GitHub Copilot cloud agent. It shows up in VS Code, Visual Studio, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and innumerable other Microsoft cloud services. Originally, the runtime was written in TypeScript and used Node.js as the framework and V8 for the execution engine. TypeScript and Node were ace for rapid development, but when used at scale, they suffered in terms of providing fast start-up and server density. “This is in no way a claim that every large TypeScript program should become Rust. Our requirements emphasized embedding through a C ABI, low startup and steady-state overhead, and predictable resource use. Rust made those goals possible,” wrote Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Stephen Toub in a post that explained the entire process. The project used Copilot to rewrite Copilot, which in turn used several LLMs – GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 4.8 were both namechecked – to execute different parts of the job, depending on each LLM’s natural strength. Well-read but chatty agents Toub assessed the use of agents as largely successful. Indeed, this project would have taken years and cost millions if done by hand. Agents showed several surprising emergent behaviors, Toub noted. For one, they spent far more time gathering information than actually writing code. “The popular image of AI spewing code is almost backwards; at this scale, the work looked much more like iterative investigation, inspecting the current state, forming a hypothesis, making a targeted change, rinsing and repeating,” he wrote. Another surprise was how frequently sessions interacted with other sessions, either those they spawned or other ones entirely. One of the thorniest conversions was the session.ts file, which was over 30,000 lines of TypeScript that touched all aspects of the runtime. The porting session, which ended up taking 25 hours to complete, began by spending 56 minutes reading the documentation and making 122 tool calls for clarification. It then spawned 15 child sessions, each creating its own worktree and agent. Then, they started communicating with each other. Using a built-in orchestration skill, one session found every other active session and sent messages to those whose missions overlapped, requesting coordination. The compiler is a teacher, not an oracle Given its performance benefits, Rust has proven to be a popular language for rewriting applications. Bun creator Jarred Sumner, for instance, recently ported the Anthropic-owned JavaScript runtime and toolkit, which contained roughly 535,000 lines of Zig code, over to Rust, almost entirely using Claude agents. As of July 30, the experimental Rust port was passing 99.8 percent of Bun's existing tests on Linux x64 glibc, with the stable releases still shipping from the Zig codebase. That job cost $165,000 in tokens. But there are hidden dangers in using Rust as well, as Toub has found. For an LLM and a lazy programmer alike, if the code compiles, then it is valid Rust. But throughout the process, the project encountered dozens of regressions within the code. A regression is something that used to work, but no longer does after an update. The compiler has no idea, for instance, whether functions are in the right order, whether the job completes at an acceptable cost, whether it meets the developer's unwritten requirements, or whether it is internally coherent at all, for that matter. At RustConf, held in Montréal last week, consultant Lisa Crossman warned about the practice of treating the compiler as an “oracle,” or the last word on whether some Rust code is valid or not. “Rust stops the agent writing memory unsafe code; it does not stop the agent writing the wrong program correctly,” she said. If they’re wise, a human developer treats the compiler as a teacher, decoding the errors as a path to a better understanding of the language’s domain. An LLM, on the other hand, just uses the compiler as a black box, one it can batter with blunt, inefficient workarounds until one passes muster (perhaps this is what Zig creator Andrew Kelley meant when he called Bun’s Rust code “unreviewed slop”). In Toub’s case, he had found that compiler-approved regressions could come from ambiguous semantics and behaviors, branch drift, missing features that weren’t ported over, and differing behaviors from the replacement code. “That’s in no way an argument against Rust’s compiler,” Toub wrote. “But ‘if it compiles, it’s correct’ is useful only as a joke.” ®

Vice President JD Vance had an awkward moment on the campaign trail in Iowa on Friday after he had to acknowledge that the state’s Republican candidate for the Senate had skipped the rally being held to help her win the election. “Shoutout to an amazing public servant, I know she couldn’t be here today, but are we going to elect Ashley Hinson the next United States senator for the great…

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trump’s mail-in ballot rule suffers another big blow…

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Jeremy Klaperman, the CFO of the company's WordPress VIP Enterprise business unit, will act as CFO for the time being.

Angle Health has grown to 5,000 customers and become profitable, by helping small businesses get "level-funded" health insurance.

Everyone in the world-models space is sitting on a pile of cash and a ton of buzz, but good luck getting anyone — from the founders to their own data suppliers — to tell you what they're actually building.

The Trump administration may be hiding exactly how many American troops have died in the Iran war. 

The Washington Post, citing six anonymous U.S. officials, reports that more U.S. service members have died than the Department of Defense has publicly disclosed. Five of these officials told the newspaper that there have been 22 military deaths during the war, four more than the 18 currently appearing in the Defense Casualty Analysis System, the DOD’s public database. 

Another unnamed official says that 23 service members have been killed since February 28, when the U.S. and Israel first launched airstrikes on Iran. Not all of the alleged undisclosed deaths are directly tied to the war, this official reportedly said, but all of the deceased soldiers were in the Middle East while the war was going on. 

This official also told the Post that three American contractors based in the region have also died since the start of the war. The details behind the undisclosed deaths are unclear, including who they were and how, when, and where they died. The Pentagon refused to answer the newspaper’s inquiries about the disputed death figures.  

The Iran war is extremely unpopular with the American people, with the risk to U.S. troops among one of many reasons why. If Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration are hiding military casualties, that raises questions as to the circumstances of their deaths and what incentive White House officials have to keep them secret. 

President Trump, Hegseth, and everyone else in the administration continue to insist that the Iran war is going well, despite the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed and Iran’s allies in Yemen, the Houthis, taking over the Bab al-Mandeb Strait on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula. Hiding American deaths further exposes the White House’s attempts to fool the American people that the war has been a success.  

Virginia is not just for lovers, but is also for datacenters, hosting more than anywhere else in the world. However, the growth could be slowing as Governor Abigail Spanberger issued an executive order on Friday cracking down on bit barn builds in the state. “In the years before I took office, datacenters came to Virginia and the Commonwealth did not have a clear or coordinated plan to address their impacts on Virginians … That changes today,” Spanberger said in a statement. The executive order is part of a broader datacenter accountability framework that calls for greater transparency, a ban on nondisclosure agreements, limits on permitting, and more stringent environmental controls. Spanberger argues that existing policy lacked the precision necessary to hold bit barn builders accountable, and that the order is necessary to protect residents. In addition to greater transparency, the broader framework would require local approval for datacenters exceeding 25 megawatts and remove future large datacenters from the expedited permitting process, while the order calls on government officials to establish criteria to distinguish between responsible datacenter developments and those that would negatively impact residents or the environment. Speaking of the environment, the order would limit the use of water-intensive cooling towers in areas suffering from water scarcity, and encourage datacenter operators to either retrofit existing backup generators to reduce emissions or switch to battery storage, fuel cells, and other clean energy sources. Friday's order comes just days after the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors backed a plan to pause final action on certain new datacenter and substation applications for up to 12 months. Loudoun County is home to one of the highest concentrations of datacenters in the state. Opposition to datacenter development across the US is on the rise amid growing concerns over the server farms' impact on air quality, noise pollution, water use, and residents' electric bills. In Tennessee, Elon Musk's Colossus 2 datacenter is powered in part by 27 gas turbines across the state line in Mississippi, which are now the subject of an NAACP lawsuit alleging violations of the Clean Air Act. Meanwhile, some states have gone even further and outright blocked the development of new datacenters while local governments get a better handle on their potential impacts. In July, New York became the first state to temporarily halt datacenter buildouts exceeding 50 megawatts as part of an executive order signed by Governor Kathy Hochul. A month later, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro issued an executive order blocking datacenter permit applications unless they made legally binding commitments to abide by the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) requirements. Much like Virginia’s executive order, these rules seek to ensure residents don’t end up footing the bill for grid improvements built based on speculative demand. ®

Thanks to AI, computer science majors are finding themselves in a tougher spot than they might have expected. Jobs are harder to come by, and more graduates are ending up in lower-paying sectors like retail and food service. That’s according to a new working paper by three US Census Bureau economists examining how college graduates from majors with the highest exposure to AI have fared since ChatGPT came onto the scene in late 2022 and helped kick off the generative AI boom. The results don’t look good for those in the most exposed fields, with career and earnings prospects for the top decile (i.e., the top ten percent of majors most exposed to AI) looking as bad as those of older Millennials who graduated during the Great Recession. “The most AI-exposed decile of college majors saw their likelihood of initial employment decline by five percentage points, while full-quarter initial earnings declined by 13 percent,” a trio of Census Bureau economists wrote in the paper. “This earnings decline is comparable in magnitude to the earnings losses associated with graduating into a large recession.” And why are those earnings declining? Well, part of the answer is where the AI-affected graduates are ending up: With job prospects worsening, more are turning to lower-wage sectors like restaurants and retail, with the researchers finding that shifts into lower-paying industries account for about half of the earnings decline. The one big difference between your usual recession and what’s happening now, the economists explain, is that the effects aren’t spread evenly across all industries. Graduates from less AI-exposed fields, including nursing and many education fields, haven’t experienced the same deterioration in early-career employment seen among those from the most exposed majors. Those having trouble are largely who you’d think: Graduates in computer science, mathematics, statistics, some engineering disciplines, networking, and (gulp) even journalists are among those in the most AI-exposed fields. The impacts that young graduates are feeling have tended to ease as they move further from graduation, but previous research on those who entered the workforce around the Great Recession suggests that years of lousy job prospects can leave graduates behind the curve on earnings. The researchers acknowledge that other factors could be at play, but the paper finds that several alternative explanations don’t fully account for the pattern. Is there an oversupply of new graduates in those fields, given how popular they are? Probably not, the paper notes, and the authors explained to us. “The most AI-exposed majors saw rapid growth in graduates in the years leading up to ChatGPT's release. After its release, the number of new graduates in these majors started to level off quickly,” the authors explained in an email to The Register. “Survey data on STEM departments also suggest that enrollments in some of the most exposed major programs have started to decline.” That said, the number of those graduates who found jobs in their field has fallen faster, they added. What about self-employment or the grad school route? Together, changes in those activities could account for as much as half of the five-percentage-point employment decline, the paper concludes. In other words, AI appears to be having an impact on the job market for young people, especially those in the most AI-exposed fields, though other factors are at play. “There are many different plausible ways in which AI may be impacting early career workers,” the research team told us. “Firms may have chosen to hire fewer new graduates for reasons that are related to AI's existence, but aren't related to firms' use of the technology themselves.” Those who aren’t embracing AI in their business may simply be less certain about the future, or they may be concerned that AI is making it harder to find suitable candidates, both of which can make job prospects for fresh graduates worse, the economists told us. The takeaway from the entire paper is essentially that, yes, AI is reshaping the labor market, and it’s having a disproportionate impact on young folks who went to school to do jobs that are being affected by AI, like software development and writing. “We should be concerned about the magnitude of these results,” the researchers told us, but they added that they hesitate to extrapolate this short-term trend into a long-term doomsday forecast for the future of the labor market. “Historical evidence shows that many jobs performed today did not exist decades ago, and it's not easy to predict what those jobs of the future might be or what skills they may require,” the authors told us. “We should be very cautious in speculating about how AI will impact the economy as a whole based on shorter-term effects on only a subset of workers.” Still, the evidence to date suggests new compsci graduates fielding questions from their parents about why they’re still slinging frappuccinos or waiting tables have a ready answer: It’s all AI’s fault. ®

President Trump’s seven-month war on Iran has cost the American taxpayer $45.1 billion, according to estimates the United States Central Command gave Congress this week. They also estimate that they’ll require another $28 billion to cover the cost to replace lost munitions.

According to the CENTCOM estimate, $28.1 billion went toward replacing spent munitions, $11.2 billion went toward general operations, and $4.3 billion went to weapons and tools that were “lost.” Another $1.5 billion went toward fuel. The estimate tracks up until September 3. It does not, however, account for the massive damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East. There was also not a more detailed breakdown of the costs.

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth estimated that the Pentagon had already spent $37.5 billion on the war at that point. That total has quickly been eclipsed, and the war has no end in sight.

Literally no one voted for this war. Trump moved on his own, at the behest of the Israeli government. Now everyday Americans are paying for it, even as the vast majority disapprove of the war and how the president has handled it. And yet Republicans don’t seem to care, even as gas prices spike and midterms draw closer.

Quick Take

• Paramount has signed Brad Pitt to star in World War Z 2, with Conclave director Edward Berger leading the long-simmering zombie sequel.
• A sequel to the 2013 film has long been a goal of Pitt, who at one time developed a followup with David Fincher.
• Nerdist’s Take: Despite the roughly 800 billion zombie movies already in existence, Paramount believes there’s money to be made in this reanimated dead horse.

Are you dead tired of zombie stories? Do you wish Hollywood would stop beating the reanimated corpse of that infected horse? Paramount either doesn’t believe you exist or doesn’t care. The studio has signed Brad Pitt to star in a sequel to World War Z from the director of Conclave.

Paramount Pictures

Deadline reports Paramount has “closed a deal” with Pitt to reprise his role as Gerry Lane in World War Z 2: Zombie Boogaloo. (Not the actual title, but we can hope.) The studio has also signed Edward Berger to direct. The sequel will see him and Pitt quickly reunite after they finished filming A24’s upcoming The Riders earlier this year. Dennis Kelly (Utopia, Matilda: The Musical) will write the script.

Deadline says Pitt began pitching Berger on the movie early on during their work on The Riders and the deal recently came together after years in limbo. Work on a sequel to the 2013 film has long been a passion project for Pitt. At one point he developed a followup with David Fincher that almost happened before budget issues stopped it.

The surprise is not that it’s now happening but that it took this long. The first movie—very loosely based on Max Brooks’ popular 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War—earned $540 million at the worldwide box office despite middling reviews from both critics and audiences.

The film ended with Pitt’s United Nations investigator helping to barely avoid a planet-destroying zombie pandemic, a premise that was a lot more fun in 2013 (a.k.a. “the before times). As for what could cause a second Zombie World War to breakout after Gerry Lane helped discover a pathogen that kept humans safe is unknown. There are no details about the plot or script just yet. But that shouldn’t be a problem for Paramount. There are roughly 800 billion zombie stories to draw from. The zombie invasion of Hollywood will never end.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow Mikey on Bluesky at @‌burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post Brad Pitt Returning for WORLD WAR Z 2 appeared first on Nerdist.

Donald Trump announced Friday he was banning several of America’s most prominent national news institutions from the White House, claiming that the prohibition was the result of “FAKE NEWS.”

He specified that he would bar CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, though it is unclear if Trump actually has the power to ban their reporters from the White House grounds. It is also unclear if the ban extends to other government buildings, such as the Capitol.

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Trump did not identify specific stories that he felt fell into that category, though earlier in the day, Trump lamented online that “CNN is so dishonest.”

“Everything they say is slanted against the Republican Party,” Trump wrote Friday morning. “They are truly FAKE NEWS!”

The news industry is an essential component of a healthy democracy. Questioning authority figures, dispelling untruths, shedding light on injustice, and disseminating verified information to the public are functions of that job in play, and tools to hold power to account.

But Trump has made it his mission since he first descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to sow public distrust in America’s news institutions. Time and again he has said the less-than-devotional coverage of his political campaigns, his fraudulent business practices, his dubious personal connections, and his presidential administrations are tantamount to “fake news.”

In recent years Trump has aggressively pursued legal action against several major news entities, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC News, and CBS News (as well as the broadcaster’s parent company, Paramount). He also sued the Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett, and pollster J. Ann Selzer in December 2024, retroactively claiming that presidential polls the paper had published prior to Election Day were election interference.

This story has been updated.

Custom Rolex watches have become the ultimate symbol of status for President Donald Trump’s White House staff, Vanity Fair reported Friday.

The so-called “White House Rolex” watches come in two styles: a gold Day-Date Presidential and a GMT Pepsi. The two designs have blue faces and a gold presidential seal on the dial. At the 45- and 47-second marks sits a blue star. On the back is an engraving of the White House. Rolex doesn’t technically make custom watches, so the ones Trump staffers wear are purchased and then modified by a bespoke business in London.

Sounds expensive, right? “There’s no one fucking rich enough in the West Wing to actually buy the watch!” one insider joked to Vanity Fair. But in an administration made up of wealthy lobbyists and former real estate investors, that’s not always true.

Unlike the ugly dress shoes Trump scared all his Cabinet members into wearing, these aren’t a gift—White House staff are shelling out thousands and thousands of dollars to own a Trumpian timepiece. Those in possession of such a grotesque display of both wealth and sycophancy include Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy fumbling peace negotiations across the world; Susie Wiles, the chief of staff who trashed her entire team; and Will Scharf, the White House counsel who’s begged the administration not to violate the Constitution.

Several members of Vice President’s JD Vance staff also wear these watches, including Nick Luna, his chief of staff, and Cliff Sims, his national security adviser. Those with White House Rolexes outside of the actual White House include Chris LaCivita, Trump’s former campaign manager, and Tony Fabrizio, the president’s personal pollster.

Claude Code customers have a new reason to give Anthropic more of their money. The tool now allows you to launch multiple sessions related to a single project, burning through more resources and cash at once. Appropriately enough, the feature is called projects and can be accessed from the Claude.ai sidebar. It's not the old version of projects, capitalized in some reference material, which allowed for the creation of self-contained workspaces with separate chat histories and knowledge bases. The new implementation is technically in beta, though that term hardly means anything anymore amid the constant code iteration. Anthropic describes projects as a way to let Claude manage multiple related tasks. "Claude scopes the request, delegates the work, coordinates parallel threads, reviews the outputs, and assembles the finished result," the company explains in a blog post. "You can steer progress throughout, even from your phone, and it keeps working after you step away from your computer." It's the sort of capability that might be useful if you are prompting the model to begin a large coding project and you want to get several essential components like authorization, databases, caching, and containers up and running at the same time. Essentially, a project spins up each task as its own Claude Code cloud session thread that works on its own git branch and its own copy of the relevant repo. A coordinator directs the threads; if they touch the same code, overlaps surface as merge conflicts like those in other pull requests. And each thread may get broken down into distinct tasks handled by subagents within that session. Claude Code now offers five different ways to run multiple tasks at the same time. Subagents work within a session, though each with its own context. Agent View provides a single screen interface for overseeing several independent tasks. Agent Teams allows coordinating multiple Claude Code instances that can share information and communicate. Dynamic Workflows allows subagents to be orchestrated by a script. And then there's projects, intended for work that spans multiple repositories, migrations that require more than a single session, or work that isn't code, like a frequently queried set of support tickets or documentation. Anthropic's caveat is that projects burn through tokens quickly. "Projects can run several threads at once, and each one is a full Claude Code session," the company explains. "Because of this, projects can reach usage limits faster." Select Pro and Max subscribers should have access to the Projects beta so long as they use Claude Code and don't have existing Projects set up on web or desktop. Pro and Max users without access can join a waitlist as Anthropic gradually expands the rollout. Team and Enterprise plans don't have access to the redesigned Projects beta yet. Anthropic reportedly told investors that, in its second quarter, it posted an adjusted operating profit - if you don't count expenses including stock-based compensation. Q2 revenue is said to be $11.5 billion, and if enough customers create projects that run multiple Claude Code threads at once, that figure could be higher still. ®

FBI Director Kash Patel temporarily paused cooperation with the FBI’s counterpart in Canada earlier this month over how the country’s national public broadcaster referred to the September 11 attacks.

The New York Times reports that after the Canadian Broadcasting Company reminded its journalists not to refer to 9/11 as “terrorism” if not citing an expert (a long-standing policy for coverage of all attacks), Patel halted some cooperation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The pause apparently didn’t last long, and wasn’t a total shutdown. Other agencies in the U.S. government continued working with the Canadian government normally.

But the FBI works closely with the RCMP on everything from terrorism to cybersecurity, and Patel’s pettiness threatens to jeopardize the already shaky relationship between the U.S. and Canada. During the pause, bureau officials canceled meetings with their Canadian opposites and said they would not be in contact for a while. This, coupled with Patel attacking the CBC’s editorial decision in multiple posts on X last month, wasn’t a positive step for the bureau’s relationship with the RCMP.

“Any agency in Canada that doesn’t publicly reject this bastardization of history, and an insult to the souls lost during our largest terrorist attack in US history will no longer have friend in this FBI.… Not to mention our heroes that responded in the aftermath 🇺🇸,” Patel posted at least twice on August 28, in replies to articles and video clips about the policy. “WE WILL NEVER FORGET 9-11.”

Later that day, CBC’s head of standards adjusted the network’s guidance, saying that terrorism now could be used to describe the attacks without attribution. The pause in cooperation still happened days later, with things reportedly going back to normal around the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks. According to the Times, FBI officials wanted some kind of apology, and it’s not known if they got one.

Canadian Culture Minister Marc Miller said that the new editorial guidance brought a “welcome change to what was a piece of pedantic and foolish guidance that caused legitimate anger.” Why Patel chose to raise a stink over this is anyone’s guess, but he has a history of slavish loyalty to Trump, and dramatic indignation over anything related to 9/11 is a conservative tradition at this point.

If you live in a state with a competitive election this year, you’ve likely seen the repulsive ads from GOP candidates and super PACs that attack Democrats on the issue of transgender rights. Republicans are spending tens of millions on absurd, bigoted, and lie-filled spots that seek to scare voters into believing that Democrats would force “sex-changes surgeries” on children.

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Jev, a new kind of AI model, is showing developers a cheaper and faster path to software intelligence.

Quick Take

• Interview with the Vampire director Neil Jordan was hoping to release a director’s cut of his 1994 film on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, but sadly, couldn’t find his preview cut of the film in Warner Bros.’ vaults.
• The cut of the film shown to test audiences is seemingly lost to time, and all that remains are some extended deleted scenes in raw format, which appear on the new 4K disc.
• Nerdist’s take: While it’s unlikely an extended cut of Interview with the Vampire will ever be found, the theatrical cut looks better than ever thanks to Warner Bros.’ new 4K transfer.

For years, fans of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles have hoped for an extended cut of Interview with the Vampire. The shooting script became widely circulated for years, so fans knew of several scenes left out of the final film, as often happens. But sadly, despite director Neil Jordan’s hope to release a director’s cut for the upcoming 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, he confirmed to Nerdist that such a release is, sadly, highly unlikely. And it’s simply because Jordan never found the longer cut screened for test audiences back in 1994 in the Warner Bros. vaults. Here’s what he told us:

I tried to track down my original cut of the movie. And I was going to deliver what they would call a director’s cut, but I could not find it in the vaults of Warner Bros. And I hadn’t kept a version of it myself. I don’t know why. But what we did turn up was these deleted scenes. So I just thought I should include them, really. You know, they’re the best of the deleted scenes. I mean, a lot of what was gone was not even worth looking at. But what is included is the stuff that kind of is of the most interest, let’s put it that way.

Warner Bros.

The deleted scenes offer the only glimpse into a potential longer cut of Interview with the Vampire. And these scenes are not in particularly great shape. Most are alternate versions of existing scenes, but two stand out for fans of the book. One is a brief conversation between Louis (Brad Pitt) and Claudia (Kirsten Dunst). In this scene, she asks her vampiric father why he never lets her see him kill. The other is a scene from the book, where a distraught Louis goes to Catholic confession. A scene which ends with Louis killing the priest.

Warner Bros. Nerdist’s Take: We Believe a Longer Cut of IWTV Is a Ship That Has Sailed

Stranger things have happened of course, and maybe this longer preview cut turns up in some bizarre location. Some films remained lost far longer than thirty years, only turning up after everyone stopped searching for them. But we wouldn’t hold our breath for that happening here. Fans will have to be content with the theatrical cut of Interview with the Vampire as it exists today. And the current 4K HD disc is the best the film has ever looked on home video in any format, so really, it’s not such a bad thing in the end.

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles arrives on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on September 22.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post An INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE Director’s Cut Is Sadly Lost to Time appeared first on Nerdist.

The demise of the Kennedy Center began with Donald Trump.

Tax documents obtained by Zeteo Friday disprove the president’s repeated claims that he “saved” the revered arts center from financial collapse, and instead illustrate that Trump’s intimate involvement in the building’s affairs last year triggered the beginning of its rapid decline.

Mere weeks after Inauguration Day 2025, Trump announced that he would remove multiple Kennedy Center trustees and install himself as board chairman—the first time in the nonprofit’s history that it would be helmed by a sitting president rather than a private citizen. In the following months, Trump worked to replace the center’s board with a group of MAGA loyalists, change its programming, and alter its internal organization.

But the Kennedy Center was not losing “hundreds of millions” or “sometimes hundreds of billions,” as Trump claimed on Wednesday, after a federal judge dealt his Kennedy Center plans another blow.

In 2024, the Kennedy Center reported more than $306 million in revenue and $558 million in net assets, according to that year’s tax return.

By September 30, 2025, the center recorded $517 million in revenue and $778 million in net assets, though its position was aided by the Big Beautiful Bill, which extended $257 million to buoy the institution. Behind the scenes, program revenue had declined by $16 million, and pledges and grants declined by $30 million, according to the center’s 2025 return obtained by Zeteo.

Three months later, Trump slapped his name on the building’s facade, an illegal decision that tanked ticket sales and donations at the performing arts center. Nonetheless, Trump’s revised Kennedy Center board asserted that adding Trump’s name to the building was the only way to ensure the space could avoid “certain fiscal collapse.”

Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center could not be renamed to include “Donald J. Trump” on its exterior. He noted that Congress singularly arbitrates the name of the Kennedy Center, which was erected to memorialize the assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Cooper issued another directive Thursday, ordering the Trump administration to provide 30 days’ notice ahead of any construction at the Kennedy Center, “including but not limited to any ‘demolition’ of the Center’s main building.” The mandate came after Trump was spotted aboard Air Force One looking at a posterboard that read: “Kennedy Center DEMOLISH” above a picture of a demolition site.

A wildly inaccurate U.S. military intelligence report produced with artificial intelligence almost started World War III, CNN reported Friday.

In the spring, U.S. military officials launched an operation to intercept a Chinese ship they believed was transporting nuclear weapons materials in the Middle East. Service members prepared to board ships, and military aircraft were already in the air, multiple sources told CNN.

That’s when officials realized that the threat wasn’t real. It was AI-generated.

The claim had stemmed from a report that was produced with the help of a chatbot, but the AI program had inaccurately identified the materials the ship was carrying. CNN was unable to identify what the ship was actually carrying. It was not clear whether the chatbot was commercially available or the government’s own knock-off version.

One of the sources told CNN that the report was “entirely false” and had “almost started a war.”

The Trump administration has been eager to embrace the AI industry—a risky bet considering the technology’s tendencies to hallucinate answers to queries.

In July 2025, the government awarded Google a massive $200 million contract to support AI solutions at the Defense Department. Six months later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rolled out GenAi.Mil, the new “American-made” AI platform that will allow military members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed”—and all without using their brains. It’s not clear whether this is the tool that falsely identified materials to make nuclear weapons.

In January 2026, Hegseth doubled down on the technology with an “AI Acceleration Strategy” at the DOD. A few months later, he promised that the U.S. military was using “every tool of AI” in the war against Iran.