Quick answer
No single person is named as the inventor of AI in the documents read for this page. A proposal dated August 31, 1955, by McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon, used the phrase artificial intelligence for a summer 1956 study at Dartmouth. Alan Turing posed the question "Can machines think?" in 1950.
Key takeaways
- The earliest document read here that uses the phrase artificial intelligence is the Dartmouth proposal dated August 31, 1955, written by four authors.
- Alan Turing's 1950 paper opens with a question, not with the phrase: Can machines think?
- Dartmouth College says the initial meeting was organized by John McCarthy; the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) says McCarthy introduced the name at a 1956 conference. The proposal itself lists four authors.
- This site's view: when a seller says AI, ask which kind of method the product uses, because the field has covered several from its first proposal.
Who invented artificial intelligence?
No source read for this page names one inventor: the phrase artificial intelligence appears in a proposal dated August 31, 1955, written by four authors, and different institutions credit different people for different parts of the field. The four authors were J. McCarthy of Dartmouth College, M. L. Minsky of Harvard University, N. Rochester of I.B.M. Corporation and C.E. Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories.
The question is harder than it looks because "invented" can mean three things: asking whether machines can think, naming the field, or building the first working programs. The documents below answer each one separately.
Read October 7, 2026. Every quotation below comes from a page opened that day. The proposal was read as an HTML copy on John McCarthy's Stanford pages (www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc); the page does not say it is a transcription, and its last line is "John McCarthy Wed Apr 3 19:48:31 PST 1996". The spelling and punctuation quoted are the copy's.
Where does the term "artificial intelligence" first appear?
In the documents read for this page, it appears in the title and the first sentence of the Dartmouth proposal dated August 31, 1955. The title reads A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. The first sentence reads: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire."
The next paragraph states the idea the study rested on: the study is "to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." That is a hypothesis the authors were proposing to test, not a finding.
This page does not claim the phrase appeared nowhere earlier. It claims only what the documents opened here show.
What does each source say, and when?
Each source below credits a different thing: a question in 1950, a proposal in 1955, a gathering in 1956, and, from 1969 to 1975, prizes whose citations describe individual careers. Rows run in date order and are not ranked. The ACM years are the years of the awards, not of the work.
| Person or document | What the source says | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence | Opens: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" and says he will "replace the question by another" | 1950 | UMBC course-page excerpt |
| McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, Shannon, proposal | Proposes a "2 month, 10 man" study of artificial intelligence for the summer of 1956 | August 31, 1955 | Stanford-hosted HTML copy |
| Dartmouth College, page on the project | Says the 1956 project "was the birth of this field of research" and that the initial meeting was organized by John McCarthy | 1956 | Dartmouth College |
| Marvin Minsky, ACM Turing Award | Citation: "For his central role in creating, shaping, promoting, and advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence." | 1969 | ACM page, Internet Archive copy (Dec 25, 2024) |
| John McCarthy, ACM Turing Award | Citation refers to his lecture as covering "the area in which he has achieved considerable recognition for his work"; ACM's biography of McCarthy says "he introduced the name artificial intelligence at a 1956 conference there" | 1971 | ACM page, Internet Archive copy (Jan 14, 2025) |
| Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, ACM Turing Award | ACM's citation says Newell and co-recipient Herbert A. Simon "made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing"; ACM's Newell biography calls the Logic Theorist, from their collaboration, "the first successful Artificial Intelligence program" | 1975 | ACM page, Internet Archive copy (Dec 14, 2024) |
The rows cover only the people and pages opened for this article; they are not a complete history of AI, and the ACM pages of Simon and of the proposal's other authors were not read.
Three notes on reading the table. First, Turing's paper is a question about machines and thinking; the excerpt read here does not contain the phrase artificial intelligence. Second, the "first successful" wording is ACM's description in its Newell biography, not a claim this page verifies. Third, the 1975 award is shared: only Newell's ACM page was read, and it names Simon as co-recipient.
What do the sources not settle?
They do not settle who wrote the phrase. The proposal lists four authors, Dartmouth College's page says "In his proposal" in the singular while naming McCarthy as organizer, and ACM says McCarthy introduced the name at a 1956 conference, while the proposal is dated 1955. The title of Dartmouth College's page is "Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coined at Dartmouth", and its text does not say who coined the phrase. None of the pages read says which of the four authors chose the words for the proposal, so this page does not either.
They also do not rank contributions. A prize citation describes what a committee honored, and a college page describes what the college commemorates. Neither is a count of who mattered most. None of the pages opened uses the label "father of AI".
Why does this history matter when a seller says "AI"?
This site's view: it matters because the word has covered several different kinds of work from the start, so a seller who says AI has told you very little. The 1955 proposal introduces its list with the line "The following are some aspects of the artificial intelligence problem" and the list includes how a computer can be programmed to use a language, "Neuron Nets" and "Self-lmprovement" (spelled that way on the page). Those are separate lines of research under one name.
The proposal's own list already put different work under one name: a program that uses language is not the same job as one that improves itself. Before you pay for a tool sold as AI, ask the seller three things:
- What does the product do for my business, in one sentence, without the word AI?
- Does a person check its output before it reaches a customer, and where?
- What happens to my data when I stop using it?
Those questions are this site's suggestion, not a standard. For tools that apply in a small business, see the practical guide to AI automation for small business and what is sold as hands-off in AI agents.
How was this page checked?
Every name, date and quotation above was read on October 7, 2026 from the pages listed in the sources. The Turing paper was read as an excerpt hosted on a university course page (which gives its title, the journal Mind and the year 1950), not on the journal's page; nothing here about the paper goes beyond that excerpt.
ACM's award pages were blocked to automated reading (also on a second attempt on October 7, 2026), so they were read in Internet Archive copies captured December 14, 2024 (Newell), December 25, 2024 (Minsky) and January 14, 2025 (McCarthy); the wording is ACM's as of those captures.
This page was drafted with Claude, which is made by Anthropic. Anthropic is not described on this page.
FAQ
Who coined the term artificial intelligence?
The proposal dated August 31, 1955, written by J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester and C. E. Shannon, uses the phrase in its title and first sentence. The ACM's page on John McCarthy says he introduced the name at a 1956 conference at Dartmouth, and Dartmouth College's page says the initial meeting was organized by McCarthy. None of the pages read says which of the four authors chose the phrase for the proposal.
When did artificial intelligence start?
It depends on what you count. Turing's paper is from 1950, the proposal that used the term is dated 1955, and Dartmouth College calls the 1956 project the birth of the field of research. Each is a different kind of start: a question, a name and a gathering.
Who is the father of artificial intelligence?
None of the pages read for this article uses that label. ACM's citations credit different people for different things: Marvin Minsky in 1969, John McCarthy in 1971, and Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in 1975.
Is the 1956 workshop the same as the 1955 proposal?
No. The proposal is a document dated August 31, 1955, asking for a study during the summer of 1956. The workshop, which Dartmouth College calls the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, is the 1956 event the document asked for.