1,200 Tech Companies Tell Senate to Pass CLARITY Act as Lummis Calls Code-as-Crime Risk an 'Absurdity'

The Consumer Technology Association, the industry group that represents more than 1,200 technology companies including Amazon, Apple and Google, urged the Senate to bring the CLARITY Act to the floor without delay. Senator Cynthia Lummis followed the next morning with an on-record statement that the bill would end the "absurdity" of software developers needing lawyers to know whether shipping code is a crime.

CTA President and CEO Kinsey Fabrizio sent the letter on June 17 to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Charles Schumer, saying the group "strongly supports the CLARITY Act and respectfully urges the Senate to bring the legislation to the floor and pass it without delay." Lummis posted her statement on June 22, writing that "software developers should not need an army of lawyers to know if their code is legal. The Clarity Act ends that absurdity."

The Signatory Footprint

CTA is not a crypto trade group. Its membership is the mainstream consumer-electronics sector that runs CES every January, with named companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Verizon. The June 17 letter argued that regulatory uncertainty is now a mainstream technology problem, complicating product launches, compliance planning and long-term investment by firms that are not crypto-native but build on or alongside blockchain infrastructure.

That puts the CTA letter in a different register from the coalition of more than 200 crypto firms led by Coinbase and Ripple that pressed Senate leadership on June 8, and from the 61-executive letter and the 160-veteran national-security letter that landed in early June. Four separate constituency letters in three weeks now sit with Thune and Schumer.

What Lummis Said

Lummis tied her statement to the legal exposure faced by developers writing code for decentralized finance tools, wallets and other noncustodial services. Her one-line headline, that the CLARITY Act ends the absurdity of developers needing legal cover to know whether their code is legal, sat inside a broader argument she has been making since the Senate Banking Committee passed the bill 15-9 on May 14 with both Democrats Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks crossing over.

She has separately warned that missing the current window could push comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation to 2030, and that the absence of statutory rules could leave digital-asset exchange customers without guaranteed claims to their holdings in bankruptcy. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the bill's most vocal opponent, filed 44 amendments during the committee markup that all failed.

Developer Protection

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act splits digital-asset oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, sets a statutory test for when a token transitions from investment contract to digital commodity, and writes explicit developer protections into law. The bill states that authors of open-source software and self-custody technologies should not be treated as financial intermediaries solely because others use their tools.

That language is what the CTA letter and Lummis are both pointing at. The current enforcement-era posture, under which the SEC sued protocol developers and noncustodial wallet builders for code others used to trade unregistered tokens, would not survive the bill's developer-classification language. The CLARITY Act also includes a "Keep Your Coins" self-custody affirmation that the noncustodial-wallet sector has lobbied for since 2022.

The Parallel Tax-Clarity Letter

A separate industry letter landed the same week on H.R. 9175, the Tax Clarity for Mining and Staking Act introduced by Representative Mike Carey. The Crypto Council for Innovation joint letter, dated June 21, asks the House Ways and Means Committee to pass H.R. 9175 as introduced, arguing that the bill replaces IRS Revenue Ruling 2023-14's at-creation taxation of staking and mining rewards with a deferred-recognition rule.

The CCI letter cites $1.7 trillion in assets secured through proof-of-stake and proof-of-work, and notes that the Joint Committee on Taxation scored an alternative five-year-cap proposal as yielding "negligible revenue" while imposing significant compliance costs. The CLARITY Act letter sits with market-structure legislation; the H.R. 9175 letter sits with tax-treatment legislation. Both target the same calendar window before the August recess.

The Coalition Picture

The crypto-political infrastructure behind the push is now visible in size. Fairshake's affiliated super PACs, including the Democrat-supporting Protect Progress arm, reported $193 million on hand earlier this year with $25 million each from Coinbase and Ripple and $24 million from a16z crypto. Coinbase's Stand With Crypto advocacy arm and the Blockchain Association have run parallel hill-meeting campaigns through the spring.

The CTA's intervention adds mainstream tech to that coalition. Amazon Web Services hosts much of the crypto industry's compute and storage; Apple and Google control the mobile-app distribution layer that wallet developers depend on. Those firms now treat CLARITY Act passage as a business issue rather than a third-party advocacy concern, and the lack of statutory clarity has become a strategic constraint on adjacent product roadmaps.

What the Letters Don't Solve

The cloture math the CLARITY Act faces in the Senate has not changed in response to industry letters. Republicans hold 53 seats, leaving the bill roughly seven Democratic votes short even with full Republican unity. Senators Mark Warner, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Chris Coons and Raphael Warnock are the moderate Democrats whose support the bill's shepherds are courting, conditioned on still-unresolved ethics and stablecoin-yield language.

What the letters do shift is the political cost of inaction. Four constituency groups (1,200 mainstream tech firms, 200-plus crypto organizations, 61 crypto executives, 160 national-security veterans) have now put their names on Senate-floor advocacy in three weeks, with Lummis providing the on-record Republican rhetorical lead. The next question is whether Thune schedules floor debate before the recess, or punts the bill into the fall calendar that runs straight into the November midterms.