Who coined the term “artificial intelligence,” and when?

Who coined the term “artificial intelligence,” and when?

John McCarthy is credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955. The phrase appeared in the proposal for a research project that would take place at Dartmouth College during the summer of 1956.

The distinction between the proposal year and the workshop year explains why both dates appear in histories of AI.

The proposal and its organizers

The Dartmouth proposal, dated August 31, 1955, lists John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon as its authors. It proposed bringing researchers together to investigate capabilities such as language, abstraction, problem-solving, and learning.

Stanford's account of AI terminology also credits McCarthy with introducing the name in 1955.

Why a shared name mattered

A research field needs more than a label, but a label helps people organize related questions. Work on logic, computation, learning, and intelligent behavior already existed before the Dartmouth gathering.

Calling the area artificial intelligence helped connect those interests into a recognizable research agenda. It made it easier to discuss which problems belonged together and to develop a community around them.

Avoiding an oversimplified origin story

The workshop was an influential organizing event, not the moment when someone invented every component of AI. Neural-network ideas, mathematical logic, and theories of computation had earlier histories.

Likewise, no single participant created modern AI alone. The field developed through contributions from many researchers and institutions.

A useful timeline therefore separates three ideas: earlier intellectual foundations, the 1955 naming and proposal, and the 1956 meeting. That preserves the milestone without erasing the work around it.