American Express is rolling out a framework designed to keep AI agents from making purchases their users never approved. The company says the nondeterministic behavior of large language models means agents can act unpredictably, so it wants to capture a customer's purchase intent early and carry it through the transaction lifecycle. The framework, called the Intent Intelligence Framework, is part of Amex's Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) developer toolkit launched earlier this year.
The process starts with a Create Intent API that records the customer's instructions and constraints, such as merchant name, budget, and product preferences. The customer then authenticates and approves the captured intent, after which Amex generates an Intent ID and a Proof of Intent Token. That token is used to obtain a digital payment credential, so the agent never handles the customer's actual card number. Amex says this helps with fraud prevention and dispute resolution, and it gives an example: if a customer asks for white Nike sneakers in size 9 but the agent tries to buy Adidas, the transaction can be blocked.
Amex says it has not yet seen an increase in disputes from agentic commerce, but it is being proactive as the market grows. The company points to its own Trendex survey, which found 66% of U.S. consumers likely to use AI agents to research prices and 61% likely to use them for product recommendations in the next year. Amex is already talking to partners across the payments ecosystem about adopting ACE, and it plans to keep developing the toolkit as agentic commerce evolves.