Originally its name was an acronym that stood for GNU NYU Ada Translator, but that name no longer applies.

The 3-million-dollar contract required[citation needed] the use of the GNU GPL for all development, and assigned the copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

founded two sister companies, Ada Core Technologies in New York City and ACT-Europe (later AdaCore SAS) in Paris, to provide continuing development and commercial support of GNAT.

FSF GNAT is part of most major Linux or BSD distributions and is included in the main GCC Sources.

JGNAT was a GNAT version that compiled from the Ada programming language to Java bytecode.