Everything is explained in the perlre man page. The first subsection under "Regular Expressions" is "Metacharacters", where it should be clear that there is no difference in "precedence" between anchors and the alternation operator (\A and \Z are just variations on ^ and $). In fact, it's not so much a matter of "binding" or "precedence", but rather an issue of "grouping" (via parens, which are also explained in that same section).