A merchant, a maximum budget, and product preferences can all be part of the instructions a customer gives an AI shopping agent. American Express wants those instructions to travel with the agent’s payment credential.
The company’s Intent Intelligence framework, published on October 13, 2026, describes how customer-approved purchase instructions can be captured before an agent transacts and carried through payment authorization and dispute handling.
The proposal addresses a specific problem for AI products that can shop autonomously: permission to use a payment method is not necessarily permission to make any purchase the agent selects. An agent might misunderstand a request, choose the wrong product, or exceed a spending limit while still possessing valid payment credentials.
American Express says the framework is available through its Agentic Commerce Experiences, or ACE, Developer Kit. Developers have an integration path, though that does not establish support at every merchant, wallet, or checkout.
Four Stages Carry Approval Into the Payment
The flow can be understood as four stages: create the intent, authenticate the customer’s approval, tokenize the payment capability, and verify the purchase against that approval.
American Express’s announcement groups some of these operations differently. Its sequence covers creating and confirming intent, establishing proof, scoping a payment credential, and applying intent throughout the transaction. In either description, customer approval happens before the agent executes the purchase, and the resulting record remains available afterward.
Create: Turn a Request Into Purchase Constraints
The Create Intent API captures the customer’s purchase instructions and constraints, including the merchant, maximum budget, and preferences.
An instruction such as “buy these shoes from this retailer without spending more than my limit” contains several separate conditions. Capturing them explicitly turns a conversational request into information a payment system can use. Subsequent systems have something concrete to check beyond the agent’s assertion that it followed the conversation.
Intent collection can vary across agentic-commerce models, the company says. The framework is intended to work regardless of which participant captures the instructions.
Whoever captures the request must accurately reflect the customer’s meaning. If an agent translates a strict requirement into an optional preference, the rest of the flow could preserve an approval record that was wrong at its starting point.
Authenticate: Confirm Who Approved What
The customer then authenticates their identity and signs off on the intent captured by the agent. American Express describes creating an Intent ID, a unique identifier for that intent, and a Proof of Intent Token representing its high-level constraints.
Identity authentication and purchase approval serve different purposes. Establishing that the customer is present does not, by itself, establish that they approved a particular merchant, budget, or product. The framework combines those steps so the approval refers to the recorded instructions.
Developers need to make that authority clear in the confirmation experience, especially when the agent will choose an item or complete checkout later. As agents gain autonomy, approval of a bounded task can let them continue working without treating every subsequent decision as unrestricted permission to spend.
Tokenize: Scope the Payment Credential to the Intent
The Proof of Intent Token can then be used to obtain a secure digital payment credential. The agent uses that credential at checkout instead of the customer’s actual card number.
American Express says the approved intent scopes this credential, helping keep the purchase aligned with the customer’s instructions. Along with hiding the card number, the proposed control associates the payment capability with an approved task.
The two artifacts perform different jobs: the Proof of Intent Token represents the approved constraints, while the digital payment credential is what the agent uses to pay.
The public announcement describes their relationship without detailing signature schemes, replay safeguards, or how every preference becomes an enforceable restriction. It supports describing an intent-linked payment design. It does not support claims that the cryptographic protections have been independently audited or that all possible deviations are automatically blocked.
Verify: Check the Purchase and Preserve the Record
The Intent ID and Proof of Intent Token can remain useful after the credential is issued. American Express says they can help validate purchase requests and support authorization decisions, fraud prevention, and dispute resolution.
Preserving intent keeps the approval available between the customer’s conversation with an agent and the payment system’s decision to accept a charge. A purchase request that conflicts with the recorded merchant or budget could potentially be identified before payment completes. If a problem emerges later, the same record could help establish what the customer authorized.
These are the company’s stated design goals. The cited announcement and reporting do not provide independent, broad-production measurements showing how frequently the framework prevents mistakes or reduces disputes.
Where Intent Checks Could Stop an Unauthorized Purchase
The clearest potential benefit is preventing an agent from making a valid payment for an unapproved purchase.
In an example reported by TechCrunch, American Express executive Hannah Bozian described a customer requesting white Nike sneakers in size 9 while the agent submits a request involving Adidas. The company’s position is that access to the approved intent could help prevent that mistaken transaction.
Checking that purchase requires more than a merchant identifier and transaction amount, both relatively direct payment checks. Shoe brand, size, and color require information about the goods being purchased. A merchant can satisfy the approved retailer constraint while selling the wrong item.
American Express’s ACE service overview identifies Cart Context as a separate capability intended to supply cart-level details for validation, authorization, and dispute investigations. It also says those specifications remain under development.
Capturing a preference does not establish that every checkout supplies the data needed to verify it. Developers need to distinguish constraints that can be enforced before payment from instructions that may primarily support a later investigation.
The framework also should not be treated as proof that agents are safe from prompt injection or compromised accounts. Its proposed protection is narrower: preserve approved authority and use it as a control when the agent attempts to transact. Whether a particular attack is stopped depends on what was approved, what the credential permits, and what the implementation checks.
A Better Dispute Record Is Not Automatic Reimbursement
Intent records could help resolve a difficult question after an agent makes a mistake: was the charge authorized, and did the purchase match that authorization?
Without a preserved approval record, an investigation may need to reconstruct the answer from conversations and transaction information. An authenticated intent gives the payment provider another record against which to compare the purchase.
American Express has separately described Amex Agent Purchase Protection on its agentic-commerce page. That page uses future-facing language and lists conditions, including a registered agent integrated with ACE and receipt of the customer-authenticated purchase intent.
Customers must also initiate a merchant return where possible. Claims are subject to review and verification, and subjective or non-verifiable instructions, such as asking for the “best” item, may not qualify. Full terms are to be made available in the future.
Sources
- Intent Intelligence frameworkmarkets.ft.com
- example reported by TechCrunchtechcrunch.com
- ACE service overviewamericanexpress.com
