Rivian to Run Third-Party AI Agents in Its Cars, CEO Scaringe Says

Scaringe did not say when Rivian would implement the feature. The company declined to provide more details, pointing instead to an "AI & Autonomy Day" event it plans to host in December.

Rivian recently rolled out an AI assistant that lets drivers and passengers operate the vehicle by speaking to it. The carmaker developed its in-car software from the ground up rather than relying on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and has built many of its own applications, including navigation, while working to integrate widely used in-car apps such as Apple Music.

Rivian says its in-house agentic framework determines the action a person wants to take when talking to the vehicle and routes the request to the appropriate part of the car's software. Most of the time that means routine tasks: turning down the temperature, activating the seat warmers or summarizing the news.

Scaringe described the routing system as a traffic light. A request can be handled by a local model running on the edge in the vehicle, sent to the cloud if the question is more complex, or passed to one of several models Rivian uses. As of May, the agent could already reach external apps including Google Calendar, and Scaringe said the next step would be to add products from frontier AI companies.

Making those agents work inside the car will require substantial engineering. "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." Placing such software close to safety-critical systems also imposes caution. "You wouldn't want an agent to determine, 'hey, it's time to apply the brakes, or time to steer the vehicle,'" Scaringe said. Anything at the level of vehicle controls, he added, will not be handed to an agent.

He expects the result to look more like an extension of how people already use agentic apps, which would require Rivian to connect the vehicle to the context those apps collect about their users. A driver could ask the Rivian assistant to switch on the ventilated seats and, in the same breath, ask for help thinking through a meal for Friday guests, with the car pulling context from an earlier conversation held on another device.

Rivian would not be the first American car company to put AI agents into a vehicle's software. Earlier this year, Tesla added a feature that lets users talk to SpaceX's Grok chatbot and its Grok Bot assistant.