I’m scrolling and a video stops me: a baby monkey, clearly upset, gets scooped up and hugged tight by an older female monkey, comforting him after a rough moment with the rest of the troop. The caption says it’s Punch, the real orphaned baby macaque who’s been all over the internet since February, finally finding a surrogate mother.

I’ve followed Punch’s actual story for months, so I know this scene, if real, would be huge news. Except something about the hug looked wrong: Punch’s arm passes straight through the other monkey’s arm like they’re not actually touching at all.

So I looked into it. Here's what I found.

Punch the Viral Baby Monkey Is Real — But Many of His ‘Videos’ Aren’t

AI-GENERATED — Punch is a real monkey. This tender hug moment is not.

Punch is a real Japanese macaque born on July 26, 2025, at Ichikawa City Zoo near Tokyo, weighing just 500 grams. His mother rejected him shortly after birth, and zookeepers Kosuke Shikano and Shumpei Miyakoshi hand-raised him, giving him a bug-eyed stuffed orangutan from IKEA that he bonded with so deeply he's rarely been seen without it since. Real videos of Punch clutching that toy for comfort made him a genuine worldwide internet sensation starting in February 2026, inspiring the hashtag #HangInTherePunch and drawing visitors, including celebrities like Filipino entertainer Vice Ganda, to the zoo just to see him in person.

That real fame made Punch an easy target for fake content. One widely shared video claiming to show him being embraced by a surrogate mother monkey racked up millions of views, but it's entirely AI-generated. Watch closely and Punch's arm passes straight through the other monkey's arm at one point, a physical impossibility no real hug could produce. Other tells are more subtle, like an oddly hyperreal, glossy sheen across the fur.

Punch's case fits a much bigger pattern. Fake AI animal videos have become their own genre, and one of the most viral examples, a clip of bunnies bouncing on a backyard trampoline tagged to look like real Ring camera footage, has racked up 203 million views on TikTok alone despite being entirely fabricated. Experts trace the appeal of the format back over a decade, to a staged 2012 student film called "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" that fooled millions before AI tools even existed, and today's fakes borrow the same basic trick: real animal footage is rare and precious, and a convincing fake can spread faster than anyone can debunk it.