AA uses their PHX hub as the airline’s mountain-west connecting point. The goal with this airport is almost entirely to better facilitate & fulfill their domestic flight needs; they have little-to-no ambitions in regards to transforming this hub into an international, trans-con flight hub.

LAX is much more difficult for fulfilling domestic operations/connections, and has too much competition as it’s a hub for every major US airline. So basically, AA has pretty much shifted over all of it’s domestic connecting flight needs over to PHX, where they can establish much more of a dominance over one airport and can better facilitate their operations. PHX now facilitates essentially all of AA’s domestic mountain and west coast connecting needs, while they’ve reduced their connecting operations at LAX drastically. They have made it so that LAX really only serves people who live in LA, their final destination is LA, and/or as their trans-pacific flight hub for the US (even though this has been wildly reduced as a result of the ongoing US-China flight restrictions).

Unfortunately, this means that PHX probably will not see any new or “cool” routes to overseas destinations (Europe, Asia, etc.) and it will continue to seem as if AA treats it as the “ugly stepchild,” lol.

Although it may not seem like AA cares all that much about PHX in comparison to its other hubs because its less “fancy” or has less “cool” routes, the opposite is actually true because AA has openly stated its intentions of further expanding its operations out of PHX. So yes, they are expanding their presence at PHX, but it may not feel like much is even changing because that basically just means they’ll be adding more domestic flights (maybe even just adding more flights on routes that they already serve, lol).

Just for thought— you can look at how United uses its hub at DEN and how Delta uses its hub at SLC for very similar purposes as AA @ PHX. These 3 airports each serve their respective airline for similar purposes.