American Express on October 13, 2026 published Intent Intelligence, a framework that records what a cardholder has actually authorised before an AI shopping agent is allowed to pay, and then carries that authorisation through the rest of the transaction. The company is releasing the specification publicly in the hope that it becomes a shared approach for payments made by agents, and has made it part of its Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit.
The process runs in four steps. A Create Intent API captures the shopper's instructions and limits, such as the merchant, a spending ceiling and product preferences, and the cardholder confirms them after authenticating. Next, the system issues an Intent ID plus a Proof of Intent Token, which encodes the main constraints. That token is exchanged for a digital payment credential, scoped to the approved intent, which the agent presents at checkout in place of the real card number. Later in the purchase, the same ID and token can be checked during authorisation, fraud screening and any dispute.
Amex's argument is about timing. Its release says current implementations typically surface the customer's intent late, while its design hands it to the card issuer before the agent buys anything. Hannah Bozian, Amex's vice president of agentic partnerships and strategy, gave TechCrunch an example: if a customer asks for white Nike sneakers in size 9 and the agent tries to buy Adidas shoes, the mismatch could be caught and the payment stopped. TokenPost, citing the specification, reported that credentials can also be limited by merchant, expiry date and number of uses.
The framework sits on a kit Amex unveiled in April 2026. Its developer page says the Intent Intelligence, Account Enablement and Payment Credentials specifications have been available since April 14, while Agent Registration and Cart Context are still being written. Amex also plans an Agent Purchase Protection programme that would cover eligible charges caused by errors of registered agents when authenticated intent was supplied.
Adoption is the open question. Amex told TechCrunch it has not yet seen more disputes from agent-made purchases and is acting ahead of the problem, citing its own survey in which 66% of U.S. consumers said they were likely to use AI agents to compare prices over the next year. The company says it is talking with partners across the payments industry, engaging with EMVCo on card-based agent transactions and supporting the x402 Foundation's work on internet-native payments.
For developers building shopping agents, the practical change is that a card-backed purchase may soon require an explicit, signed record of what the user asked for, not just a stored credential. That could make agents easier to trust, but it also adds an integration step that every agent platform and merchant would need to support.
So far the framework is a published design, not a measured result. Amex has not released data showing how often intent checks block bad purchases, and its value will depend on whether other networks, issuers and agent builders adopt the same model.