Nitrenes are reactive intermediates for many organic reactions, such as Curtius rearrangement. The thermo- or photochemical- decomposition of azides or isocyanates was known to generate nitrenes. We investigated the thermal chemistry of nitrene adsorbed on Cu(111) using benzyl azide (Bz-N=N=N), benzyl isocyanate (Bz-N=C=O) and phenyl isocyanate (ph-N=C=O) as precursors under ultrahigh vacuum conditions using temperature-programmed reaction/desorption (TPR/D), reflectionabsorption infrared spectroscopy (RAIRS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Our study shows that despite of the isoelectronic functionalities (-N=N=N vs. -N=C=O) these molecules undergo different reaction pathways. For benzyl azide (Bz-N=N=N), the azido group losses N2 ,and the phenyl group migrates from nitrogen to carbon, forming surface bound H2C=N-Ph at 210 K. Eventually, H2 elimination and a carbon-to-nitrogen phenyl shift give the thermally stable ph-CN final product. XPS reveals that benzyl isocyanate (Bz-N=C=O) rearranges to form amide intermediate on the surface, which breaks into CO2, HCN and toluene at 410 K. RAIRs suggests that phenyl isocyanate (ph-N=C=O) undergoes cyclodimerization, cyclotrimerization and condensation to remove CO2 at 170 K, and phenyl group shifts from nitrogen to carbon to produce a metal bound acyl nitrene species (Ph-(C=O)-N---Cu) at 410 K.