RJ Scaringe Confirms AI Agents Are Coming to Rivian Vehicles

Rivian Assistant may soon have company. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this month, RJ Scaringe said Rivian vehicles will eventually be able to run AI agents from other companies, including Anthropic. “That’s where it becomes magical,” the Rivian CEO said onstage.

Scaringe didn’t say when the feature would arrive, and Rivian declined to share more details. Instead, it pointed to its AI & Autonomy Day event in December.

How AI Agents Would Work in a Rivian

The groundwork is already in place. Rivian Assistant launched on the R1 lineup earlier this spring, running on an in-house agentic framework that figures out what you want and sends the request to the right part of the car’s software. Simple requests run on a local model inside the vehicle, while more complex ones go to the cloud.

Since May, the assistant has been able to tap into apps like Google Calendar and Gmail. The next step is bringing in agents from frontier AI labs, which TechCrunch suggests could include Claude, OpenAI’s Dots, or Meta’s Muse. Scaringe admitted that will take “a lot of plumbing” and coordination with the labs themselves.

Safety is a clear line. Scaringe said “anything that’s vehicle-level controls [is] not being handed to an agent,” so third-party AI won’t be steering or braking. He described a driver asking Rivian Assistant to run on the ventilated seats, then asking for help planning a Friday dinner based on a conversation they’d had with a supported AI agent on another device the day before.

The R2 Is Built for This

Rivian builds its in-car software from scratch instead of relying on CarPlay or Android Auto, which gives it more control over integrations like this. Software chief Wassym Bensaid also recently said more map features are on the way for Rivian’s vehicles and mobile app.

Rivian Wave

Hardware matters too. Rivian Assistant is heading to the R2 in its next update, and the R2 packs 200 Sparse TOPS of Edge AI compute, more than the rest of the lineup. That’s enough to run a local LLM, which should help when third-party agents arrive.

Tesla Got There First

Rivian won’t be the first to bring AI agents to the car. Tesla added Grok Bot to its vehicles last month, letting owners manage email and calendars, shop online, and order coffee hands-free, though it’s currently limited to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. Rivian’s approach would open the car to agents from multiple AI companies instead of just one.

We should learn more about Rivian’s agentic plans at December’s AI & Autonomy Day. It’ll be the next big chance for Rivian to share a timeline and which partners are on board.