---
id: "1956-06-01-dartmouth-workshop"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/1956-06-01-dartmouth-workshop/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "1956-06-01"
date_precision: month
category: milestone
importance: 5
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/1956-06-01-dartmouth-workshop/

# Dartmouth Summer Research Project coins 'artificial intelligence'

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.

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on AI (Stanford copy)](http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf) (jmc.stanford.edu, paper)
2. [Wikipedia: Dartmouth workshop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop) (en.wikipedia.org, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created