In June 2013, Snowden took internal NSA documents which he shared with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, resulting in the global surveillance disclosures.

[8] The Verge questioned how the program developed in later years, since the document was composed in the early period of the iPhone and smartphones in general.

John Stewart, senior vice president and chief security officer of Cisco stated that they were "deeply concerned and will continue to pursue all avenues to determine if we need to address any new issues."

[11] Both Der Spiegel and Appelbaum have played an important role in the leaks of Edward Snowden, but neither clarified if the ANT catalog came from him.

[13] Author James Bamford, who is specialized in the United States intelligence agencies, noted in a 2016 commentary article that Appelbaum has not identified the source who leaked the ANT catalog to him, which led people to mistakenly assume it was Edward Snowden.

Security expert Matt Suiche noted that the software exploits leaked by the Shadow Brokers could be seen as genuine because it matched with names from the ANT catalog.

[18] John Bumgarner has stated to IEEE Spectrum that US government suspicion of Huawei is based on its own ability to add backdoors as shown in the ANT catalog.

After the initial leak, Michael Ossman, the founder of Great Scott Gadgets, gave a shout out to other security researchers to start working on the tools mentioned in the catalog and to recreate them.