Stopping Streams

Cancelling ongoing streams is often needed. For example, users might want to stop a stream when they realize that the response is not what they want.

The different parts of the AI SDK support cancelling streams in different ways.

AI SDK Core

The AI SDK functions have an abortSignal argument that you can use to cancel a stream. You would use this if you want to cancel a stream from the server side to the LLM API, e.g. by forwarding the abortSignal from the request.

import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';
import { streamText } from 'ai';

export async function POST(req: Request) {
  const { prompt } = await req.json();

  const result = streamText({
    model: openai('gpt-4-turbo'),
    prompt,
    // forward the abort signal:
    abortSignal: req.signal,
  });

  return result.toTextStreamResponse();
}

AI SDK UI

The hooks, e.g. useChat or useCompletion, provide a stop helper function that can be used to cancel a stream. This will cancel the stream from the client side to the server.

'use client';

import { useCompletion } from 'ai/react';

export default function Chat() {
  const {
    input,
    completion,
    stop,
    isLoading,
    handleSubmit,
    handleInputChange,
  } = useCompletion();

  return (
    <div>
      {isLoading && (
        <button type="button" onClick={() => stop()}>
          Stop
        </button>
      )}
      {completion}
      <form onSubmit={handleSubmit}>
        <input value={input} onChange={handleInputChange} />
      </form>
    </div>
  );
}

AI SDK RSC

The AI SDK RSC does not currently support stopping streams.