Claim · 2011-08-28 · publication · Stated in source · Supported

According to Goertzel's 2011 post, Shane Legg suggested 'Artificial General Intelligence' when Goertzel asked friends by email, in 2002 or so, for a title for the book he was editing with Cassio Pennachin.

One recorded claim. The claim panel gives its qualification, the source passages with their place in each source, and how it was checked.

What it connects

Who coined the term “AGI”? → explicitly credits → Shane Legg

Where it appears

No collection page holds this claim. It is listed with its records in the explorer.

Claim and evidence

Who coined the term “AGI”?explicitly credits ↓Shane Legg

Machine-checked, not reviewed by an editorStated in sourceSupported

Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source

Date: 2011-08-28 · publication Records dated 2011 →

Scope and limitsGoertzel's retrospective account, attributed to him; it concerns the suggestion of the book title, not the earliest use of the phrase, and the same post reports Gubrud's earlier use. Not resolved here. No retrieved statement by Legg is recorded (his thesis site refused).

The evidence 01

primary sourceSupports the claim

Who coined the term “AGI”?

goertzel.org (author's site) · 2011-08-28

Cite the original source

Cite the original document, not Selekoa. Check these details against it.

Source excerpt

“Shane Legg, an AI researcher who had worked for me previously, came up with Artificial General Intelligence.”

Location in source Paragraph beginning 'The fairly undramatic story'

How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher

Machine-checked · 2026-10-31

Source details and check notes

Authors: Ben Goertzel
Version: Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29 (SHA-256 26b1b2848b4541c590b770b343fc121a045afdbf9504e0c895d9eb65d9dc7a3b). Post as currently served on the author's site, dated August 28th, 2011 in its byline; the site marks older material as 'Archived Site (Pre 2021)', so the post may have been migrated. This retrieval was not compared with an archive capture.
Canonical address: Open the canonical source ↗
Accessed: 2026-10-29
Language: English (en)
Attribution: Ben Goertzel, “Who coined the term “AGI”?”, 2011-08-28.
Reuse: No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution.
Check notes: Candidate pack passage, Kinds of AI and technical history (research/technical-history). The quotation (17 words) matched the text retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29. Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes, PDF line-break hyphens and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. The source role is primary for this record: the passage is the text’s own attribution, which is what the record states (corrected at admission; the pack had secondary, relative to the person credited). A cross-family machine check (30 October 2026, item 49) re-read the record’s sources and found that they support what the record states. No human editorial review.

Status and meaning

Editorial status. Not reviewed by an editor. An exploratory record that no editor has accepted. This status does not say whether a person has read any linked passage. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.

Relation. A document expressly attributes intellectual or practical contribution to a named actor, with the scope retained in the claim.

Date. Date of the post; the events it reports (about 2002 for the email exchange) are dated only by this account.

Record ID th-credit-goertzel-2011-legg