No single person “created AI.” Modern artificial intelligence grew out of decades of work by many researchers, with a few names usually highlighted as key founders.

Quick answer

  • The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, who is often called the “father of AI.”
  • Earlier, Alan Turing laid the theoretical foundations of AI with his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and the idea of the Turing Test.
  • Other early pioneers include Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon, who helped turn AI into a formal research field in the 1950s and 1960s.

How AI as a field began

  • In 1956, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence formally launched AI as a research discipline; this meeting was organized by John McCarthy and colleagues and is widely seen as AI’s “birth” moment.
  • At this workshop, the term “artificial intelligence” was used in a research proposal co‑authored by McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon.

Key early contributors

  • Alan Turing : Proposed that machines could “think,” introduced the Turing Test, and provided the conceptual groundwork for machine intelligence.
  • John McCarthy : Coined “artificial intelligence,” organized the Dartmouth conference, created the LISP programming language, and is frequently called the father of AI.
  • Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon : Built early AI programs and are often listed with McCarthy as founding figures of the field.

So who “created AI”?

  • Historically, many sources credit John McCarthy as the person who “invented AI” because he named the field and led its first major conference.
  • More accurately, AI is the result of collective work : Turing’s theories, McCarthy’s naming and tools, and the early systems built by Minsky, Newell, Simon, and others all together created what we now call AI.

Information gathered from public data and internet sources and portrayed here.