No single person “invented” AI, but a few key pioneers are usually highlighted as the closest answer to that question. Most historians credit John McCarthy with “inventing AI” in the sense of founding it as a formal research field, while Alan Turing is often seen as the intellectual father whose ideas made AI thinkable in the first place.

Quick Scoop: Short Answer

  • There is no single inventor of AI, but several founders.
  • John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” and organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, widely treated as the “birth” of AI as a field.
  • Alan Turing’s earlier work on machine intelligence and the Turing Test laid the conceptual groundwork and earned him the title “father of theoretical AI” or “father of computer science.”

What “invented AI” really means

When people ask “who invented AI?”, they mix together two things:

  • Who named and organized AI as a research field.
  • Who first imagined and formalized the idea that machines could think.

Because of that:

  • John McCarthy is often called the father of AI for turning it into a defined discipline: he coined the term “artificial intelligence” around 1955 and led the famous Dartmouth Conference in 1956, which many histories treat as AI’s official starting point.
  • Alan Turing is called the father of machine intelligence or theoretical AI because his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and his Turing Test framed the core question: “Can machines think?”

Key pioneers you should know

John McCarthy (often “invented AI”)

  • Coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the mid‑1950s and co‑authored the proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, which kicked off AI as a formal field.
  • Developed the LISP programming language, for decades the dominant language for AI research, and helped popularize concepts like time‑sharing in computing.
  • Commonly described as the “father of AI” in modern articles, textbooks, and timelines.

Alan Turing (conceptual father of AI)

  • Proposed the idea of a general‑purpose machine (the Turing machine) that could simulate any computation, which underlies modern computers and AI.
  • In 1950, introduced the Turing Test , a behavioral test of whether a machine can show human‑like intelligence in conversation, and asked the famous question “Can machines think?”.
  • Frequently described as the “founding father of artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science.”

Other early “founding fathers”

  • Marvin Minsky – Co‑founder of MIT’s AI Lab and a major figure in symbolic AI.
  • Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon – Built early AI programs such as the Logic Theorist (1955) and the General Problem Solver, showing that symbolic reasoning could be automated.
  • Together with McCarthy and Turing, they are often listed as the “founding fathers” of AI.

Was AI “invented” at one moment?

Histories of AI usually say no single moment or single person fully “invented” AI.

Instead, they describe:

  • Pre‑1950s foundations : mathematical logic, early computers, and Turing’s work on computation and intelligence.
  • 1956 Dartmouth workshop : McCarthy and colleagues (Minsky, Rochester, Shannon) formally launch “artificial intelligence” as a research agenda.
  • Later breakthroughs : expert systems, machine learning, and modern deep learning (e.g., work by Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio) that turned AI into what it looks like today.

So, if you need one-liners:

  • If the question is about the name and field : “AI was ‘invented’ by John McCarthy when he coined the term and organized the Dartmouth Conference in 1956.”
  • If the question is about the idea : “The conceptual father of AI is Alan Turing, who laid the foundations of machine intelligence and proposed the Turing Test.”

Information gathered from public sources and historical overviews of AI’s development.