American Express rolled out an Intent Intelligence Framework on October 13, built to stop AI agents from completing purchases their users never authorized. The framework captures and authenticates a shopper's purchase intent before an agent executes the transaction, and Amex wants it to become an industry standard for AI-powered payments. It extends the Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Toolkit the company launched in April.
Highlights#
- A Create Intent API records the customer's instructions plus any constraints included in the request, such as merchant name, maximum budget, and product preferences. The customer then authenticates their identity and signs off on the intent the agent captured.
- The flow produces an Intent ID and a Proof of Intent Token. The token is exchanged for a secure digital payment credential the agent presents at checkout, so the customer's actual card number never travels with the agent.
- Amex says its approach pulls intent verification earlier in the transaction flow, which stops problems before money moves. VP of Agentic Partnerships and Strategy Hannah Bozian's example: a customer asks for white Nike sneakers in size 9, the agent submits Adidas, and the mismatched purchase can be blocked outright.
- The same Intent ID and token can feed fraud prevention and dispute resolution, giving companies a log of what each agent was authorized to do, and when.
- Amex told TechCrunch it has not yet seen a rise in disputes from agentic commerce, but a recent Amex Trendex survey found 66% of US consumers are likely to use agents to research best prices and 61% would accept product recommendations in the next year. The company is building the rails ahead of the volume, with payments ecosystem partners already in discussions to implement ACE.
Why it matters#
Agent commerce needs a provable link between what a human authorized and what an agent actually executed. Intent tokens that persist across the transaction lifecycle are the card-network answer to the same problem escrow and on-chain reputation solve for agent-to-agent settlement: verifiable proof of mandate when a transaction is later disputed.