Interaction of Wildcard Characters and Square Brackets

An escape character retains its special meaning within square brackets, unlike wildcard characters.

Do not use existing wildcard characters as escape characters in the escape clause, for these reasons:

If you specify square brackets or percent sign (“_” or “%”) as an escape character, it loses its special meaning within that like clause and acts only as an escape character.
If you specify a left or right square bracket (“[” or “]”) as an escape character, the Transact-SQL meaning of the bracket is disabled within that like clause.
If you specify a hyphen or carrot (“-” or “^”) as an escape character, it loses the special meaning that it normally has within square brackets and acts only as an escape character.