Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company eventually expects its vehicles to run AI agents developed by other companies, including frontier AI labs such as Anthropic. Rivian did not provide a launch timeline or further implementation details, directing attention to an AI & Autonomy Day event scheduled for December.

Rivian recently introduced an in-car AI assistant that allows drivers and passengers to interact with the vehicle using voice commands. The company built its software stack largely in-house rather than relying on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and it has created an agentic framework that determines what action a user wants and routes the request to the appropriate vehicle software.

The framework can select between local models running in the vehicle and cloud-based models, depending on the complexity of a request. Typical tasks include changing the temperature, activating seat warmers and summarizing news; as of May, the assistant could also access external services such as Google Calendar. Rivian would need additional technical integration and coordination with AI companies to support their agents and share relevant user context across devices.

Scaringe said agents would not be allowed to control safety-critical vehicle functions, such as applying the brakes or steering. He suggested that future use cases could combine vehicle commands with broader conversational tasks, such as preparing the car’s ventilated seats while helping plan a meal using context from a previous conversation. Tesla has already added access to its Grok chatbot and Grok Bot assistant, making it an earlier example of an American automaker integrating AI agents into vehicle software.