Overview
- Kyoto University’s Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior confirmed Ai’s heart stopped on January 9, 2026, citing multiple organ failure tied to aging.
- Ai spent nearly her entire life at the Kyoto research institute after arriving from West Africa in 1977.
- She took part in decades of controlled studies on perception, learning and memory that informed scientific understanding of primate cognition and yielded publications including in Nature.
- Researchers documented abilities such as recognizing the alphabet and over 100 Chinese characters, distinguishing numbers 0–9 and eleven colors, and identifying roughly 300 objects.
- Her biography includes early training on a computer-linked keyboard from 18 months old, spontaneous drawing without food rewards, a reported cage escape using a key, and motherhood to Ayumu, born in 2000.