Aryl stannanes are easily accessible from o-silylated aryl triflates in the presence of KF and Bu 3 SnH. The corresponding arynes are formed in situ, and undergo clean hydrostannation to give a mixture of the regioisomeric aryl stannanes. The whole reaction sequence can also be carried out as a one-pot reaction under microwave irradiation.Vinyl stannanes are interesting building blocks in organic synthesis, 1 and are easily available, for example, by hydrostannations of alkynes. In general, these hydrometallations can be carried out under radical or transition-metalcatalyzed conditions. 2 In principle, aryl stannanes should be accessible by the same protocol using arynes. Based on their high reactivity, the tin hydride addition should be a relatively fast process. Surprisingly, to the best of our knowledge, such a direct synthesis of aryl stannanes via hydrostannation of arynes is not yet been described in the literature. In general, aryl stannanes are obtained from aryl halides via halogen-metal exchange (with Mg, 3 Li 4 or Zn 5 ) and subsequent transmetallation with R 3 SnCl. Alternatively, aryl stannanes can be obtained by Pd-catalyzed coupling of aryl halides with (R 3 Sn) 2 6 or via radicalnucleophilic substitution of triorganostannyl anions and aryl chlorides, aryl phosphates or aryl ammonium salts. 7 Furthermore, Pd-catalyzed distannylations of arynes with (R 3 Sn) 2 have been described. 8 Based on our interest in Mo-catalyzed hydrostannations of alkynes, 9 we were interested to see if such a hydrometallation might also work with arynes. Arynes are easily accessible from o-silylated aryl triflates, 10 which were synthesized according to a known procedure from the corresponding o-bromophenols via O-silylation and a sequence of lithiation/silyl-migration/triflation. 11 We began our investigations with the simple silyl triflate 1a, which does not give regioisomers in the hydrostannation step. In general, arynes are prepared in the presence of fluoride, preferentially under the influence of crown ethers. Therefore, we used these conditions in our first experiments (Table 1). With our hydrostannation catalyst Mo(CO) 3 (CNt-Bu) 3 (MoBl 3 ), a very clean reaction was observed, giving rise to phenylstannane 2a in excellent yield. Although hydrostannations of alkynes in general require reaction temperatures of around 50°C, here the reaction was complete after two hours at room temperature, probably because of the high reactivity of the aryne.We also investigated the influence of other fluoride sources (entries 2-4). Comparable results were obtained with CsF in MeCN, but the use of tetrabutylammonium fluoride (TBAF) and KF in the presence of tetrabutylammonium bromide (TBAB) as phase-transfer catalyst gave significantly lower yields and required longer reaction times. This clearly indicates that aryne formation is the rate determining step. Because the very fast and clean reaction at room temperature was quite surprising, a control experiment was conducted without the Mo catalyst to establish its role (entry 5...