Rivian's cars will in future be able to run AI agents made by other companies, such as Anthropic, the carmaker's founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week.
"That's where it becomes magical," Scaringe said onstage. He did not say when Rivian would implement this, and the company declined to offer more details, pointing instead to its "AI & Autonomy Day" event in December.
Rivian recently rolled out an AI assistant that lets drivers and passengers interact with its electric vehicles by talking to them. The company says it has built its own in-house agentic framework that works out what action a person wants and routes it to the right part of the car's software, such as adjusting the temperature, activating seat warmers or summarising the news.
Scaringe described the routing process as being like a traffic light: a request may be handled by a local model running on the vehicle, or sent to the cloud for more complex questions, with different models used in each case. As of May this year, the agent could access external apps such as Google Calendar.
He said adding products from frontier AI companies would require significant behind-the-scenes work and coordination with the labs, and that placing such software near safety-critical systems means Rivian has to be extremely careful. "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.
Scaringe said the implementation would more likely resemble an extension of how people currently use agentic apps, with the car connecting to context those apps collect. He gave the example of a driver asking the Rivian assistant to turn on the ventilated seats and then asking for help planning a meal for guests on Friday, with the car pulling context from a conversation held on another device.
Tesla earlier this year added a feature letting users talk to SpaceX's Grok chatbot and its Grok Bot assistant.