Rivian is licensing parts of its Rivian Assistant AI technology to Volkswagen Group as part of the two companies’ joint venture, according to Rivian’s Q3 investor presentation released Thursday, which TechCrunch first spotted.
Rivian didn’t say what VW is paying or which models will get it. TechCrunch pointed to the ID.EVERY1 as the likely first candidate, since the small hatchback is already set to be the first VW running Rivian’s software and electrical architecture after it cleared winter testing back in March.
This one stands out because AI was one of the areas Rivian kept for itself when VW became its largest shareholder earlier this year. Rivian called the expansion “a proof point for the extensibility of the platform we’ve built in-house.”
The assistant launched on R1 in May and reached R2 in October. RJ Scaringe told TechCrunch at Disrupt 2026 that it runs on an in-house agentic framework that figures out what you’re asking for and routes it to the right part of the vehicle’s software. That could eventually let Rivians run AI agents from other companies, including Anthropic, and it lines up with the agentic features Rivian has planned for 2027.
The money side is already showing up. Software and services brought in $605 million at a 42% margin in Q3, with the VW joint venture and Autonomy+ doing a lot of the lifting.
VW has already confirmed its SSP platform will run on Rivian software starting in 2029, so this probably won’t be the last piece of Rivian tech that ends up in a VW. I’d expect VW’s version of the assistant to look and sound different from the one in your Rivian, since each brand in the joint venture keeps its own interface, but the brains underneath should be familiar.
