Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week that the company’s cars will eventually be able to run AI agents built by other companies, including Anthropic. “That’s where it becomes magical,” he said onstage. He did not say when the feature would arrive; Rivian declined to provide more details and pointed to its “AI & Autonomy Day” event in December.

Rivian already has an in-car AI assistant that lets drivers and passengers interact with their vehicles by voice. Rather than relying on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, the company built its in-car software from the ground up and created an in-house agentic framework that understands what action a person wants to take and routes it to the appropriate part of the car’s software. Scaringe compared it to a traffic light: simple requests are handled by a local model running on the edge in the vehicle, while more complex questions can go up to the cloud, where different models are used. As of May, the agent could access external apps such as Google Calendar.

The next step is integrating products from frontier AI companies, but Scaringe said that won’t be easy. “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. That’s also a lot of coordination with the labs to make sure they enable that plumbing,” he said. Because the software sits near safety-critical systems, Rivian is being careful: “Anything that’s vehicle-level controls are not being handed to an agent.” Instead, the implementation would likely resemble how people already use agentic apps, with the vehicle connecting to context that apps like Meta’s Muse collect. Scaringe gave an example: a driver asks the assistant to turn on the ventilated seats, then says, “We were talking yesterday about this meal. I’m planning to have guests over on Friday. Can you help me think through what we’re going to make?” The car could pull the driver’s context from a conversation they had with an assistant on another device.

Rivian wouldn’t be the first American car company to add AI agents to its software: earlier this year, Tesla added a feature that lets users talk to SpaceX’s Grok chatbot and Grok Bot assistant.