Many transition-metal complexes and some metalfree compounds are able to bind carbon monoxide,amolecule which has the strongest chemical bond in nature.H owever, very few of them have been shown to induce the cleavage of its C À Obond and even fewer are those that are able to transform CO into organic reagents with potential in organic synthesis. This work shows that bis(pinacolato)diboron, B 2 pin 2 ,r eacts with ruthenium carbonyl to give metallic complexes containing borylmethylidyne (CBpin) and diborylethyne (pinBCCBpin) ligands and also metal-free perborylated C 1 and C 2 products, such as C(Bpin) 4 and C 2 (Bpin) 6 ,respectively,which have great potential as building blocks for Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling and other reactions.The use of 13 CO-enriched ruthenium carbonyl has demonstrated that the boron-bound carbon atoms of all of these reaction products arise from CO ligands.The strongest chemical bond in nature is that of carbon monoxide,which has adissociation energy of 1076 kJ mol À1 at 298 K. Therobustness of this triple bond has akey influence on the chemistry of this simple molecule.Although carbon monoxide is inexpensive and readily available,t he synthetic chemical industry only uses it as af eedstock in very few processes,s uch as the water-gas shift reaction (synthesis of CO 2 and H 2 from CO and water), the hydroformylation of olefins,t he preparation of phosgene, methanol, and acetic acid, and the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of hydrocarbons (hydrogenation of CO).[1] Among these industrial processes,t he latter is the only one in which the CÀOb ond of carbon monoxide is cleaved. From the point of view of fundamental research, the cleavage of CO under mild reaction conditions has long been an attractive challenge because it could provide new ways of transforming CO into highly functionalized C 1 ,C 2 ,a nd C n molecules.T od ate,a part from some ruthenium and osmium carbonyl clusters,which are able to transform two CO ligands into CO 2 and acarbide ligand, [2,3] only ahandful of transitionmetal complexes are known to cleave CO ligands with [4][5][6] or without [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] the help of other reagents.T hese reactions have, in some cases,a fforded metal-free CO-derived organic products, [4-6, 13, 16] but all these products are hydrocarbons. In contrast, it has recently been shown that some reagents of low-valent p-block elements are able to activate free or metal-coordinated CO.Regarding boron-containing reagents, Stephan and co-workers and Erker and co-workers have reported that some frustrated Lewis pairs promote the reduction of CO with either hydrogen [17] or HB(C 6 F 5 ) 2 , [18,19] Siebert and co-workers have reported the insertion of CO into ac yclic diborane, [20] and Braunschweig and co-workers have reported the coupling of CO at ab oron-boron triple bond [21] and at ametal-boron double bond.[22] By using other p-block elements,wenote that CO can be reduced by certain singlet carbenes [23] and transient triplet carbenes, [24] ag ermylene compound can coupl...