Rivian wants its electric vehicles to run AI agents built by other companies, CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. The carmaker already offers an AI assistant that lets drivers and passengers interact with its vehicles by voice. The next step, Scaringe said, is opening the car to outside agents, such as the ones made by Anthropic.
“That’s where it becomes magical,” Scaringe said onstage.
He did not say when the change would happen. Rivian declined to offer more details and pointed instead to its “AI & Autonomy Day” event in December.
The idea is not hard to picture. Rivian has built its in-car software from the ground up rather than relying on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and it has developed many of its own applications, including navigation. The company has also worked to integrate popular in-car apps such as Apple Music. Outside assistants like Claude, OpenAI’s Dots or Meta’s Muse could eventually fit into that setup.
Rivian says it has built its own in-house agentic framework. The system works out what a person wants when they speak to the vehicle and sends the request to the right part of the car’s software. Most requests are routine. Drivers ask the car to lower the temperature, switch on the seat warmers or summarize the news.
Scaringe described the system as a traffic light. “So if you ask the vehicle something, it decides what model it’s going to use,” he said. “It can use a local model that’s running on the edge and the vehicle. If it’s a more complex question, it can go up to the cloud. And then even for that, we have different models that we use.”
As of May, the agent could access external apps like Google Calendar. Scaringe said bringing in products from frontier AI companies will take considerable work. “There’s a lot of plumbing behind the scenes we have to do to make sure that that works, and it’s not just within Rivian,” he said. “That’s also a lot of coordination with the labs to make sure they enable that plumbing.”
Safety is the bigger constraint. Scaringe said putting this kind of software near safety-critical systems means Rivian has to be extremely careful. Vehicle controls will stay out of the agents’ hands.
“You wouldn’t want an agent to determine, ‘hey, it’s time to apply the brakes, or time to steer the vehicle,’” he said. “So anything that’s vehicle-level controls are not being handed to an agent.”
Instead, Scaringe expects the integration to look like an extension of how people already use agentic apps. That would require Rivian to connect the vehicle to the context that apps like Muse gather about their users.
He offered an example. A driver could ask the Rivian assistant to turn on the ventilated seats, then ask a follow-up about a meal they discussed with another assistant on a different device. “We were talking yesterday about this meal. I’m planning to have guests over on Friday. Can you help me think through what we’re going to make?” Scaringe said, describing the request. The car could then pull that context from the earlier conversation.
Rivian would not be the first American carmaker to add AI agents to its vehicles. Earlier this year, Tesla added a feature that lets users talk to both SpaceX’s Grok chatbot and its Grok Bot assistant.
Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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