AI agents are coming to Rivian's cars

Rivian recently rolled out an AI assistant that lets drivers and passengers interact with its electric vehicles by talking to them. But the carmaker’s founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week that Rivian’s cars will eventually be able to run AI agents built by other companies, such as Anthropic — a shift he described as transformative for the driving experience. Scaringe didn’t say when Rivian would implement this, and the company pointed instead to the “AI & Autonomy Day” event it’s hosting in December.

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 built its in-car software from the ground up rather than relying on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, developing most of its own applications, including navigation. Rivian says it has built its own in-house agentic framework that understands what action a person wants when they talk to the vehicle and routes the request to the right part of the car’s software — most of the time, that means something like turning down the temperature, activating the seat warmers, or summarizing the news.

Scaringe compared the system to a traffic light: depending on the complexity of a request, the vehicle decides whether to use a local model running on the edge in the car itself or send the question to the cloud, where it can draw on different models for different tasks. As of May, the agent could already access external apps like Google Calendar, and Scaringe said the next step would be adding products from frontier AI labs — though making that work inside the car won’t be simple, since it requires significant engineering coordination between Rivian and the AI labs themselves, not just within Rivian.

Because this kind of software sits near safety-critical systems, Scaringe said Rivian has to be extremely careful about where it draws the line. “You wouldn’t want an agent to determine, ‘hey, it’s time to apply the brakes, or time to steer the vehicle.’ So anything that’s vehicle-level controls are not being handed to an agent,” he said. Instead, he expects the rollout to look more like an extension of how people already use agentic apps, meaning Rivian would need a way to connect the vehicle to the context those apps already collect about their users — for instance, pulling up a conversation a driver had with an assistant on another device to help plan a meal for guests.

Rivian wouldn’t be the first American car company to add AI agents to a vehicle’s software. Earlier this year, Tesla added a feature letting users talk to both SpaceX’s Grok chatbot and its own Grok Bot assistant.

Why it matters

Rivian’s approach — opening the cabin to outside AI agents while keeping braking and steering strictly off-limits — offers an early template for how automakers might balance AI convenience against safety as agentic assistants move from phones into cars. Success will depend on Rivian persuading AI labs to build the technical plumbing it says the integration requires.