According to http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/#sec-future-reserved-words "await is only treated as a FutureReservedWord when Module is the goal symbol of the syntactic grammar." This code should be illegal I think: http://www.typescriptlang.org/play/#src=import%20'foo'%3B%0A%0Alet%20await%20%3D%203%3B Came up when discussing TS semantics with @ajklein (v8 ES6 module expert).