Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Wednesday criticized the Trump administration’s decision to take a 10% stake in embattled chipmaker Intel, calling the investment “a step towards socialism.”

Intel announced last month that the U.S. government made an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, purchasing 433.3 million shares at a price of $20.47 per share, giving it a 10% stake in the company. Intel noted that the price the government paid was a discount to the current market price.

Rand said government ownership is “a bad idea.”

“It’s always a mistake to say, ‘Well we have this one bad policy, all right, we’ll tolerate a little socialism, but we don’t want anymore,” Paul told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

President Donald Trump said on Truth Social last month that the government’s stake in the chipmaker is a “great Deal for America, and, also, a great Deal for INTEL.”

Trump has taken an increasingly heavy hand in the private sector, raising concern among conservative lawmakers like Paul, who have long opposed big government. In August, the Trump administration said the government would take 15% of certain Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices chip sales to China. The Pentagon bought a $400 million equity stake in rare-earth miner MP Materials. It also took a “golden share” in U.S. Steel as part of a deal to allow Nippon Steel to buy the U.S. industrial giant.

Among the most vocal supporters in Congress of Trump’s Intel proposal has been Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist from Vermont. Sanders, a longtime and vocal Trump critic, told news outlets last month that, “Taxpayers should not be providing billions of dollars in corporate welfare to large, profitable corporations like Intel without getting anything in return.”

But Rand said it’s not smart to involve the government in the free market.

“I worry that the free market movement, the movement that was a big part of the Republican Party, is being diminished over time,” Rand said.

WATCH: Sen. Rand Paul on U.S. government’s stake in Intel: It’s a step towards socialism

German startup DeepL on Wednesday said it was expanding beyond artificial intelligence-powered translation into general AI agents focused on businesses.

The term “agent” refers to an AI tool that can carry out tasks in the background in response to user prompts.

DeepL Agent is designed to complete “repetitive, time-intensive tasks across a wide variety of functions” according to the company. It can responds to natural langauge commands from a users. DeepL Agent can be used in various teams from human resources to marketing, the company added.

Agents or agentic AI have become buzzwords in the technology industry, underscoring how companies see how these digital assistants automating more mundane tasks. Companies such as Microsoft with Co-Pilot and Anthropic’s Claude are products focused on the enterprise customer.

The move is a step beyond what DeepL, which is valued at $2 billion, has focused on since it was founded in 2017. It potentially pits the company against major AI players like Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft, which are targeting enterprise customers.

DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski told CNBC on Wednesday that the company’s agent was a natural extension of its translation product.

“We found out that the technology is as capable of helping you whenever you’re doing research or whatever you’re doing,” Kutylowski said.

“All of those tedious tasks in your office when you have to switch between different systems and take some data from one system, put it into another one, AI, and those autonomous agents, and the DeepL Agent in particular, can help solve so much better.”

DeepL’s translation product is based on its self-developed large language models. Kutylowski said DeepL Agent is based on its own models, as well as on those available “externally” from other providers.

While there are a large number of companies advertising AI agents, the market is still in a very early stage. Overall investor interest in AI companies is meanwhile still high. Amazon-backed Anthropic on Tuesday announced a funding round that put the firm at a $183-billion post-money valuation.

Technology listings appear to be gathering steam, with both fintech firm Klarna and crypto exchange Gemini this week unveiling details of their upcoming initial public offerings.

Against this backdrop, CNBC asked Kutylowski if DeepL was considering an IPO, to which he responded: “That’s not a short term plan that we would be considering right now.”