Intent, captured before the purchase
American Express has published a framework for recording what a customer told their shopping agent to do, and for proving it to the card issuer before the agent spends anything.
The company published Intent Intelligence on 13 October, describing it as its recommended approach to “capturing and authenticating a customer’s purchase intent before an AI agent completes a transaction”. The framework then “preserves that intent as a control throughout the transaction lifecycle”. It is available through the Amex Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit.
The design choice Amex is making is about timing. Its stated difference from current implementations is “making a customer’s authorized purchase intent available to the issuer earlier in the transaction lifecycle — before an agent executes a purchase”.
How it works
Amex describes four steps.
A Create Intent API captures the customer’s purchase instructions and constraints — “such as Merchant, maximum budget, and other preferences”. The customer then authenticates and signs off on what the agent recorded.
That produces two artefacts: an Intent ID, “a unique identifier for the customer’s intent”, and a Proof of Intent Token representing the intent’s high-level constraints. The token is used to obtain a digital payment credential that the agent presents at checkout “instead of the customer’s actual Card Number”, scoped by what the customer approved.
Both then persist. The Intent ID and token “can serve as controls in subsequent steps of the purchase journey”, supporting fraud prevention, authorisation decisioning and dispute resolution.
Why a card network is doing this
The commercial argument is in the quote. “Building trust into AI-powered transactions is critical to the adoption of agentic commerce,” said Luke Gebb, head of global innovation at American Express, adding that intent supplied before an agent transacts “can give issuers greater confidence that an agent is acting as a customer intended, while also helping issuers proactively manage risk and reduce the chance of costly disputes across the payments ecosystem.”
Disputes are the operative word. When an agent buys the wrong thing, somebody absorbs the chargeback, and under current arrangements the issuer has no record of what the customer actually authorised. Amex is both issuer and network, which is why it can propose a control that spans both sides.
Amex says it has not seen agent-related disputes rise, according to TechCrunch, and is acting ahead of the problem rather than in response to it.
The standards question
Publishing the framework openly is the point: Amex says it “aims to help advance a common industry approach for intent in agentic commerce”. It names two venues — engagement with EMVCo on card-based agentic transactions, and support for the x402 Foundation’s work on internet-native payments.
The framework builds on the ACE Developer Kit, which Amex launched in April 2026 alongside Amex Agent Purchase Protection for purchases made by registered agents.
What to watch
A framework one issuer publishes is a proposal, not a standard. The release names no merchant, no agent platform and no implementation date, and Amex says only that it is “actively developing ACE Kit integrations”.
So the thing to watch is whether a second network adopts the same shape — in particular whether EMVCo picks up intent as a thing a card transaction carries. Until then, an agent paying with an Amex card is the only place this control exists.
