Dartmouth Summer Research Project coins ‘artificial intelligence’
Confirmed
Importance: historic (5 of 5)The takeaway
The 1956 Dartmouth workshop, organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, is regarded as the founding event of AI as a field; the term ‘artificial intelligence’ comes from its 1955 proposal.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Historic (5 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Proposal dated 31 August 1955
- Organizers: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon
- Held over roughly eight weeks in summer 1956 at Dartmouth College
- Attendees included Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (Logic Theorist)
What happened
A small group of researchers met at Dartmouth for a summer study premised on 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.’
Why it matters
It named the field, set its ambitions, and gathered the people who led AI research for decades.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on AI (Stanford copy)jmc.stanford.edu, paper
Reactions
- Wikipedia: Dartmouth workshopen.wikipedia.org, discussion
Changes
- Filed