Did you recently renew your Airpass contract?
Late last year (I believe around September), Airpass apparently began switching to a "NextGen" Airpass, which changes the rules significantly. Those rules are also NOT reflected in my 2021 contract. I agree it's odd that AA would just so blatantly go against written contract terms.
The biggest changes I see so far are:
1) Ticketing and debiting of funds from the account are instant (refunds are not, however, instant, and I found the refund process -exceptionally- frustrating -- trips would show refunded on the Prefunds site, but the funds never went back to my UATP card).
2) Instrument upgrades like SWUs are no longer allowed.
3) If you fly with a companion, your AAdvantage number is no longer applied to their reservation (they use their own number), so rather than the Airpass member earning companion miles, the companion now earns their own.
There may be other changes I haven't noticed, but the NextGen Airpass is the new product and, per the Airpass reps, everyone will eventually be converted to it as contracts are renewed.
This press release is the only publicly available document I can find from AA that references any change to Airpass, but it seems like it's essentially talking about the NextGen product. The phone reps have a whole file about it that tells them what they should and shouldn't do now with Airpass bookings, but some of them seem to be very confused and not fully in the loop about these changes.