Creeping Control of Military Industry Unsettles Some Lawmakers

First, President Donald Trump dictated that defense contractors stop buying back their stock and limit their CEOs’ pay.

More recently, the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic PBC for refusing to scrap one of its founding principles on how its AI could be used.

In between, the US government has made itself the largest shareholder of chip-making giant Intel Corp. and rare-earths miner MP Materials, and a substantial investor in several other private and public companies in the national security sphere.

The Trump administration has justified its interventions as necessary to reshape the US military-industrial complex in a race to dominate production of ...