American Express publishes framework for verifying AI agents’ purchase intent

American Express published its Intent Intelligence framework on October 13, setting out its recommended approach to capturing and authenticating a customer’s purchase intent before an AI agent completes a transaction, according to the company’s release. The framework then preserves that intent as a control throughout the transaction lifecycle. American Express is making the framework publicly available to help advance a common industry approach to intent in agentic commerce.

A Create Intent API captures the customer’s purchase instructions and constraints, such as the merchant and a maximum budget, and the customer then authenticates and signs off on the intent the agent captured, according to the release. Luke Gebb, head of global innovation at American Express, said that authorised intent available before an agent transacts can give issuers greater confidence that the agent is acting as the customer intended, and help them manage risk and reduce costly disputes.

The framework is part of Amex’s Agentic Commerce Experiences developer toolkit, launched in April, according to TechCrunch. Amex has not yet seen an increase in disputes because of agentic commerce but wanted to build the technology ahead of scale, TechCrunch reported. Hannah Bozian, the company’s vice president of agentic partnerships and strategy, said Amex is seeing “thousands” of weekly agentic commerce transactions across the integrations its network supports, according to Digital Transactions.

Amex chairs the EMVCo working group on agentic commerce, Digital Transactions reported. EMVCo opened a draft framework for card-based agentic payments on September 1, and Meta and Sierra announced the Personal Agent Protocol on October 6.