John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the 1955 proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project.
McCarthy was a computer scientist at Dartmouth College when he drafted the proposal with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The document proposed a 1956 study of whether aspects of learning and intelligence could be described precisely enough for machines to simulate them.
The proposal’s wording is historically important because it used “artificial intelligence” as the name of the research field. The Dartmouth workshop itself took place during the summer of 1956 and helped establish AI as a distinct academic area.
McCarthy later made other major contributions, including the Lisp programming language and the idea of time-sharing on computers. Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Herbert Simon were also foundational AI figures, but they did not coin the field’s name in that proposal.