Rivian says cars may run Anthropic agents for voice assistants
Rivian said its cars may eventually run AI agents made by other companies like Anthropic to make its in-car voice assistant way more helpful.
Revealed by CEO RJ Scaringe at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, these upgrades will let you do a lot more with your car's voice controls: think turning down the temperature, activating seat warmers, summarizing the news, accessing Google Calendar, and pulling context from conversations on another device.
We'll get the full scoop at Rivian's "AI & Autonomy Day" in December.
Rivian forbids agents controlling vehicle functions
Because Rivian builds its own software (instead of relying on Apple CarPlay or similar systems), adding these new AI features is pretty smooth.
You'll be able to sync things like Google Calendar and get answers from both in-car and cloud-based AI.
Importantly, Scaringe says all this cool tech will stay separate from anything that controls the car itself: Scaringe said, "You wouldn't want an agent to determine, 'hey, it's time to apply the brakes, or time to steer the vehicle.' So anything that's vehicle-level controls are not being handed to an agent."
Safety first, always.