Rivian says AI agents from Anthropic and other companies will run in its cars

RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian, said at TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2026 that the company's vehicles will eventually be able to run AI agents developed by third-party companies such as Anthropic. He did not provide a timeline, pointing instead to Rivian's AI & Autonomy Day event scheduled for December.

Scaringe described Rivian's in-house agentic framework, which interprets a user's spoken request and routes it to the appropriate part of the vehicle's software. The system decides which model to use based on the complexity of the question: simpler tasks are handled by a local model running on the edge and in the vehicle, while more complex queries are sent to the cloud, where Rivian uses multiple different models.

Most of the current requests involve common cabin controls such as adjusting temperature, activating seat warmers, or summarizing the news. Since May 2026, the agent has also been able to access external apps like Google Calendar. Scaringe said the next step is to bring in products from frontier AI companies, though he acknowledged that making them work in a car will require significant coordination with the AI labs.

Scaringe emphasized that vehicle-level controls, such as braking or steering, will not be handed to agents. He described the future implementation as an extension of how people already use agentic apps, with Rivian connecting the vehicle to the user context those apps collect. For example, a driver could ask the Rivian assistant to turn on ventilated seats and then ask it to help plan a dinner using context from a conversation on another device.