First deployment on empty Hobby project is classified as Production even from preview branch

I’m seeing reproducible first-deployment behavior on a new Hobby project.

Current state:

Project is paused and must remain non-live. There are currently zero deployments. Vercel CLI version: 59.16.0.

Reproduction:

vercel deploy vercel deploy --target preview GitHub push from a non-production branch: preview/staging-180fcee

In all three cases, when the project had no previous deployments, the first deployment was classified as Production:

target = production OIDC environment = production

This happened even when the deployment originated from the preview branch.

Each unexpected deployment was immediately deleted, and the Git integration was disconnected.

I need a strictly Preview-only initialization path because creating any Production-target deployment is not permitted in this workflow.

Could you please confirm:

Is this a known first-deployment behavior/bug? Is there an officially supported way to create the first deployment with target=preview without creating any Production-target deployment first? If REST API is used, does omitting the target field guarantee Preview classification on an empty project?

I’m specifically looking for a fail-closed Preview-only initialization method.