AI agents are coming to Rivian’s cars

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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.

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.

“Think of it as like a traffic light. So if you ask the vehicle something, it decides what model it’s going to use.