Amex introduces a framework to prevent AI agents from making unauthorized purchases

American Express is introducing a new framework designed to ensure AI agents only make purchases their users have authorized, potentially preventing costly mistakes and disputes as AI-powered shopping grows. Personal AI agents are increasingly making transactions on their users’ behalf, but given the nondeterministic nature of large language models, AI bots are prone to doing what they’re not supposed to. Which, in this case, raises the possibility of AI misfiring and making unauthorized transactions. To get ahead of this problem, American Express is introducing a new framework designed to capture and authenticate a customer’s purchase intent before an AI agent completes the transaction. The idea is that there should be a way to ensure that the customer’s purchase instructions are carried throughout the transaction lifecycle, Amex says, from the purchase to everything that follows.

Dubbed the “Intent Intelligence Framework,” the company hopes it will become an industry standard for AI-powered transactions. “These new transactions will have a consumer, a merchant, and an agent,” explained Amex’s VP of Agentic Partnerships and Strategy, Hannah Bozian, in an interview with TechCrunch. She said the company wanted to ensure that agentic transactions are still “seamless, trusted, and secure, the way our card members expect them to be.” This framework’s release follows the company’s April launch of Amex’s Agentic Commerce Experiences, or the ACE Developer