This could be big. It's not too many years ago that the general understanding here was that any airline involved on an xONEx itinerary could write the ticket -- although some, e.g., AA, didn't want to bother with it unless there was a trans-oceanic segment on their metal (but I vaguely remember anecdotes in this forum about people getting trips ticketed by carriers who weren't even involved at all!).

If it's not an AA initiative policy change but rather something imposed upon the AA RTW desk by OW, then it raises a couple of questions. (1) Is this something that OW wants to enforce (for whatever reason) only on AA, or (2) is it something that will sooner or later apply to all OW carriers in their writing of xONEx tix? That could be a conscious strategy to either force some OW members to up their game or alternatively to make the xONEx (and perhaps the GlobalX too but I don't know anything about that one) much less attractive to pax.

It will be interesting to see if / when / how this new requirement is incorporated into the Rules.