Any risks cloning the internal drive of a Macbook pro M1?

There shouldn't be any risk, but it may not work.

Carbon Copy Cloner doesn't recommend it (but can), and I hear SuperDuper! will do it.

On Apple Silicon you don't have to enable external boot, but you will have to "bless" the external when you try to boot from it. The "blessings" are stored on the internal drive in Apple Silicon.

Some people seem to be able to clone an Apple Silicon Mac while others seem to have issues. Definitely hit or miss especially after one of the updates to macOS 12.x Monterey when the cloning issues of Apple Silicon Macs seemed to manifest. Of course, people having issues may have had some very odd setup which they did not communicate to the community which affected their ability to successfully clone their systems. Great if it works, but very hard to say how you will fare. Personally you are probably better off by performing a clean install of macOS to the external drive, followed by migrating everything from the internal drive.

You should be able to do it, even with Carbon Copy Cloner . This Electric Light Comapany article, Can you create an external bootable disk by cloning an M1 Mac?, seems to indicate you can.

Tigersoul925 wrote:

What I plan to do is installing macos to the external drive then using migration assistant to transfer app apps and settings.

Maybe that's what you're referring to by migrating?

Yes.

Cloning when dealing with macOS is when you make a functional equivalent of the source in one step by using a third party app which basically just copies all the files (and recreates any other necessary volumes). The two most common apps used for cloning a macOS boot drive are Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper. Unfortunately Apple is slowly killing off bootable clones with all the changes Apple is making both to macOS and the new hardware of the Apple Silicon Macs.