I dont know how Google can measure intent. By intent you mean bots differentiating between natural and unnatural link building. In that case, i have seen numerous cases where natural links got penalty. Example, one of my client did a product launch at a government start up conference. They got massive visibility and 3 direct links from .gov websites and 20 odd links from huge newspaper brands. Also, they had overnight listing in wikipedia. A month later google gave the dreaded unnatural link penalty. After all, google is also a bot