Palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction of azides with isocyanides.

An efficient palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction of azides with isocyanides is developed, providing a general synthetic route to unsymmetric carbodiimides with excellent yields. This method shows a broad substrate scope, including not only aryl azides, but also unactivated benzyl and alkyl azides. Furthermore, from readily available substrates, Pd-catalyzed coupling with a tandem amine insertion cascade to obtain unsymmetric trisubstituted guanidines has been achieved in a one-pot fashion.