Rivian CEO Scaringe: cars will run Anthropic AI agents

Rivian recently rolled out an AI assistant that lets drivers and passengers interact with its electric vehicles just by talking to them. At TechCrunch Disrupt this week, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said the next step would be to add products from the frontier AI companies, though he said making them work in the car won't be easy.

Scaringe described an in-house agentic framework that acts like a traffic light, deciding which model to use — a local model running on the edge in the vehicle, or a cloud model for more complex questions. He said there is "a lot of plumbing behind the scenes" Rivian has to do, including coordination with the labs to make sure they enable that plumbing.

He framed the likely implementation as an extension of how people currently use agentic apps. In one example, a driver could ask the Rivian assistant to turn on the ventilated seats and then ask it to help plan a meal for guests on Friday, with the car pulling context from a conversation the driver had with the assistant on another device. Scaringe also noted that earlier this year Tesla added a feature that let users talk to both SpaceX's Grok chatbot and its Grok Bot assistant, so Rivian would not be the first American car company to add AI agents to a car's software.