Rivian plans future in-car third-party AI agents
Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt that in the future Rivian vehicles will be able to run AI agents made by other companies, such as Anthropic. Rivian says its in-house agentic framework understands what a user wants and routes the request to the right part of the car's software, using an on-device local model for simpler requests and cloud models for more complex ones. Scaringe gave no implementation timeline, and Rivian declined to offer more details, pointing to its December "AI & Autonomy Day" event. He also said vehicle-level controls such as braking and steering will not be handed to an agent.
Rivian recently rolled out an AI assistant that lets drivers and passengers interact with the company’s electric vehicles just by talking to them. But the carmaker’s founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week that, in the future, Rivian’s cars will be able to run AI agents made by other companies like Anthropic.
“That’s where it becomes magical,” Scaringe said onstage.
Scaringe didn’t say when Rivian would implement this, and the company declined to offer more details, pointing instead to the “AI & Autonomy Day” event it’s hosting in December.
But it’s not hard to imagine how Rivian might integrate something like Claude, OpenAI’s Dots, or Meta’s Muse assistant into its software. The company has developed its in-car software from the ground up, instead of leaning on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and built a lot of its own applications, like navigation (though it has worked to integrate popular in-car apps like Apple Music).
Rivian says it has created its own in-house agentic framework that understands what action a person wants to take when they talk to the vehicle, and routes it to the right part of the car’s software. Most of the time, that involves what you’d expect: asking the car to turn down the temperature, activate the seat warmers, or summarize the news.
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