AI Agents Are Coming to Rivian Vehicles

We will likely learn more about the company's approach at its upcoming "AI & Autonomy Day" event in December.

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Rivian recently launched an AI assistant that allows drivers and passengers to interact with the company's electric vehicles just by talking to them. But the automaker's founder and CEO, RJ Scaring, said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week that in the future, Raven cars will be able to operate AI agents made by other companies, such as Anthropic.

"This is where it gets magical," Scaringe said on stage.

Scaringe didn't say when Rivian would implement this, and the company declined to provide further details, pointing instead to an "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 into its software. Instead of relying on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, the company has developed its own in-car software from scratch, building many of its own apps like navigation (though it has worked to integrate popular in-car apps like Apple Music).

Rivian says it has built its own internal agent framework that understands what action a person wants to take when talking to the vehicle, and directs that to the right side of the car's software. Most of the time, this involves what you'd expect: asking the car to turn down the temperature, turn on the heated seats, or summarize the news.

"Think of it like a traffic light. So if you ask the vehicle something, it decides what model to use. It can use a local model that works on the edge and the vehicle. If it's a more complex question, it can go to the cloud. And even for that, we have different models that we use," Scaringe said.

Since May of this year, this agent can access external applications such as Google Calendar. And Scaringe said at Disrupt that the next step is to add products from frontier AI companies, though getting them to work in a car won't be easy.

"There's a lot of behind-the-scenes plumbing that we have to do to make sure this works, and it's not just inside Rivian. It's also a lot of coordination with the labs to make sure that plumbing works," he said, adding that putting this kind of software near critical safety systems means Rivian has to be very careful.

"You don't want an agent to determine, 'Hey, it's time to apply the brakes or time to steer,'" he said.

Instead, he thinks the implementation is more like an extension of how people use these agent programs. That means Rivian needs to find a way to connect the vehicle to all the context that apps like Muse collect on its users.

For example, Scaringe said, a driver can ask Rivian Assistant to turn on the ventilated seats before going deeper. "And then simultaneously say, "Yesterday we were talking about this food. I am going to have a guest on Friday. Can you help me think about what we want to build?” he said The car can then pull the driver's context from a conversation they had with an assistant on another device.

Of course, Rivian isn't the first American car company to add AI agents to car software. Earlier this year, Tesla added a feature that allowed users to talk to both SpaceX's Grok chatbot and its Grok Bot assistant.

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