AI agents are coming to Rivian’s cars

Rivian plans to allow third-party artificial intelligence agents from companies like Anthropic to run inside its electric vehicles. Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe announced the upcoming software direction during an appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt. Rivian recently introduced an in-house voice assistant that lets passengers control basic vehicle features by talking.

The company built an internal routing framework that acts like a traffic light, directing simpler voice requests to local models running on the vehicle and more complex questions to cloud models. Scaringe stated that integrating external frontier AI models will require extensive backend plumbing and close coordination with AI labs.

He emphasized that Rivian will keep safety-critical vehicle controls away from external agents, ensuring they cannot operate brakes or steering directly. Rivian has not announced a specific launch timeline for third-party AI agents. The company declined to provide further details, pointing instead to an upcoming "AI & Autonomy Day" event scheduled for December.