Artificial intelligence (AI), as a significant feature of modern development, has changed the form of education, especially with a significant impact on higher education (HE). Clarifying the integration and infiltration of HE and AI is of great significance for the future development of AI in HE. The Citespace is used to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the indicators such as authors, institutions, nationalities, disciplines, journals, and highly cited articles of AI research literature -located at HE included in the Web of Science core collection database. The results show that in recent years, AI in the field of HE has received extensive international attention, and the research results are in a growing trend. In the field of international HE, AI focuses on hot topics such as parameter design, deep learning, machine learning human-computer interaction and hybrid learning. And deep learning, learning space simulation design, learning effectiveness measurement, etc. will become an important development direction of international AI research in the field of HE.