American Express (Amex) is building a system that lets AI agents make purchases and payments on behalf of users — but right now it’s only within its own payments network, and it still involves a black box that could hinder trust and auditability.
Amex already participates in Agentic Commerce Protocol projects, Specifically Google’s Agent Pay Protocol (AP2)Which focuses on interoperability. On the other hand, Amex’s Agentic Commerce Experience (ACE) developer kit touches on something that most protocols currently lack: full transaction control in the payments layer.
But it’s still not completely transparent about how it handles verification. ace Uses a closed-loop system to validate agent-led transactions – acting as both the card issuer and payment network.
Luke Geb, Amex’s EVP and global head of innovation, told VentureBeat that the company believes this model is the missing piece in agentic commerce.
“What’s been missing so far is the perspective of a company like ours: We think trust and security are critical to driving this sector forward,” Gabe said. “This is really the first time that an issuer is coming to the negotiating table.”
Amex sits in that interesting spot: Unlike other financial institutions or card providers like Chase or Bank of America, Amex can route transactions through its American Express network. Visa and MasterCard are two of the most well-known payment networks, but these companies do not issue cards themselves and must work with a bank.
The perpetual black box of agentic commerce
The ACE Kit is just one approach to solving some of the biggest problems in agentic commerce: trust, control, accountability, verification, and security.
Consumers generally don’t want rogue agents to run away with their bank accounts and start buying things. Merchants don’t want to be stuck with unpaid items. Banks don’t want to deal with the influx of chargebacks and the potential for fraud.
Projects like ACE Kit aim to build trust and accountability by verifying an agent’s identity and goals. This can build the trust that agentic commerce so desperately needs.
Amex claims it also offers verification, although the process behind this is unclear. It abstracts how it performs verification, even though it details at what level it does it. More traditional systems employ a mix of deterministic checks and flexible, semantic evaluation that helps match the intent and outcome of validation. Amex said agents built with ACE can allow users to submit shopping carts and check them against the agent’s original intent. However, he did not reveal how it works.
Businesses building agentic commerce ecosystems lament that despite progress in building the trust layer, many black boxes remain that could hinder widespread adoption.
Raj Ananthapillai, founder and CEO of identity and verification systems provider Trua, told VentureBeat that payment protocols and software kits like the Agentic Commerce Suite from Stripe, Google’s Verifiable Intent Proof series, and the ACE Developer Kit "Excel in handling the mechanics of proofs, verifiable authorities, and fund movements, but leave upstream human verification opaque and underdeveloped."
Ananthapillai continued: "Without a clear, high-assurance cryptographic link that proves an agent is operating under the clear authority of a verified human owner, merchants, issuers, and networks face declines, massive chargebacks, unapproved people conducting financial transactions, and increased risk of fraud."
ACE Kit
The ACE Developer Kit solves many of the ongoing issues with agentic commerce, Gabe said, and gives developers access to integrated services:
- agent registration
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account activation
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intention intelligence
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payment credentials
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cart context
First, it concerns agent registration, establishing identity and trust with both consumer and company agents. When a transaction is initiated, the agent acting on behalf of the customer and the merchant’s agent can verify each other’s identities and be confident that they are dealing with the correct entity.
Next comes account activation, which links a user’s Amex account to their agent and allows the agent to act, or, in the case of agented commerce, buy something.
Intent Intelligence creates what Amex calls an intent contract, where the user defines what they want the agent to do. Once the intent is defined, the ACE system generates a intent id and a proof of intent token Which definitely proves authority in case of dispute.
Amex handles the actual transaction part, where the user pays for the product through a single-use token. The ACE establishes the payment credentials used for transactions, which are tied to intent and constraints.
“Once the agent finds the item the customer has asked for, like red shoes, they will call for payment credentials, which is a token that contains the limits provided by the card member,” Gabe said. “So, for example, if they said they only wanted to spend $500, that token would not allow a $600 purchase because of the controls built in.”
The final piece is cart reference and verification, which Gabe said helps banks and brands compare a user’s cart that their agent submitted to what they intended.
Amex’s approach shows that for agented commerce to truly grow, providers need to understand what the systems will allow agents to do and who will ultimately be accountable if something goes wrong.
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