John McCarthy Coins the Term 'Artificial Intelligence' in the Dartmouth Conference Proposal
In 1955, John McCarthy of Dartmouth College, together with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, submitted a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for a summer research workshop, introducing the term 'artificial intelligence' and framing machine intelligence as a formal field of scientific inquiry.
Background
By the early 1950s, several research communities were already thinking seriously about thinking machines. Norbert Wiener had laid out cybernetics, the study of control and communication in animals and machines. Alan Turing had published his 1950 paper asking whether machines could think, and had proposed the imitation game as a way to approach the question. Elsewhere, researchers in logic and mathematics were building formal systems that could manipulate symbols according to rules.
What was missing was a shared identity. The people working on these problems came from different disciplines and did not necessarily think of themselves as working on the same thing. There was no common name for the field, no agreed set of questions, and no institution that treated machine intelligence as a subject in its own right rather than a curiosity at the edge of something else.
What happened
In 1955, John McCarthy of Dartmouth College sat down with Marvin Minsky of Harvard University, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM, and Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories to write a funding proposal. They sent it to the Rockefeller Foundation. The document asked for support for a summer workshop at Dartmouth, where a small group of researchers would spend several weeks trying to make progress on the problem of machine intelligence.
The proposal contained the phrase “artificial intelligence” as the name for what they were doing. McCarthy coined the term. But the document carried all four names, and the thinking in it was collective. The authors opened with a conjecture that has defined the field ever since: that every aspect of learning, and every other feature of intelligence, can in principle be described precisely enough that a machine can be made to simulate it. That was a bold claim to put in writing. It meant that intelligence was not magic, not biology, not beyond reach. It was, at least in principle, an engineering problem.
The summer workshop that followed in 1956 was informal. It was not a formal conference with proceedings and programme committees. A rotating group of researchers came and went over several weeks. Progress on the stated problems was limited. But the proposal itself, written the year before, had already done something the workshop could not undo: it had given the field a name, and with that name came the possibility of a discipline. Researchers could now say what they were working on. Funding bodies could identify it. Students could seek it out.
The four authors were not writing from nowhere. Rochester had been involved in building early computers at IBM. Shannon had already published foundational work on information theory. Minsky and McCarthy were both young and had been thinking hard about automata and computation. The proposal drew on all of that, and pointed it in a direction.
Why it mattered
The 1955 proposal document is the first recorded use of the phrase 'artificial intelligence', giving the nascent field both a name and an institutional identity that distinguished it from cybernetics and automata theory. By framing 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', the authors set out an agenda that shaped research priorities for decades. The Dartmouth Summer Research Project of 1956 that followed is widely treated as the founding event of AI as an organised discipline.
People
John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon
Organisations
Dartmouth College, Rockefeller Foundation, Bell Labs, IBM
Sources
- A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.Stanford University (hosted copy of original 1955 proposal).Primary source
- The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years.AI Magazine, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.Secondary
Cite this page
AI Achievements. (1955). John McCarthy Coins the Term 'Artificial Intelligence' in the Dartmouth Conference Proposal. Retrieved 2026-08-22, from https://achievements.ai/milestone/artificial-intelligence-by-john-mccarthy
@misc{achievements_artificial_intelligence_by_john_mccarthy,
title = {John McCarthy Coins the Term 'Artificial Intelligence' in the Dartmouth Conference Proposal},
author = {{AI Achievements}},
year = {1955},
url = {https://achievements.ai/milestone/artificial-intelligence-by-john-mccarthy}
}