Yeah, I fear that at the very least AA would make it difficult to make a pattern of circumventing married segment availability on award tickets. Frankly, if they're bothering with widespread married segment pricing, they have to.

And with awards, they probably have more recourse if you, for example, drop the last segment. Since AAdvantage miles are their property, not ours, they'd probably be within their legal rights to reprice if you don't fly a segment. For a hypothetical example, you book JFK-LAX-SFO for 12,500 miles when there's no sAAver availability on JFK-LAX standalone, and AAnytime is 25k. No show for the LAX-SFO segment? Fine, AA deducts the additional 12,500 miles from your account. Is there anything that would prevent AA from doing that legally? They certainly can't bill your credit card for the fare difference when you use hidden city ticketing and no show for the last segment on a cash fare, but I bet they legally could do that with awards.