bash command XOR ^ anothercommand
As you can see in man bash, ^ is not used to separate commands, it's used inside arithmetic expressions.
$ echo $(( 5 ^ 9 ))12That's because
dec bin 5 0101 9 1001-----------12 1100
If you enter command ^ anothercommand, you are simply providing command with two arguments, ^ and anothercommand. There is no operator here. anothercommand will only run if command decides to treat that argument as a command name and attempt to run it.