BitLocker apparently tried to encrypt a drive...WHILE cloning

I've run into a bizarre issue and I need some help/advice about how and why the above happened. I've been trying to clone a Windows 11 drive to several computers and this problem has significantly hampered my progress. As a bit of backstory, while making the "master" drive (I'll call it M1) that the others would clone from I ensured that BitLocker was disabled. I then cloned the master to create a second master (M2), since I had two NVME cradles I could use to speed up the process. BitLocker should still be disabled on both now.

My issue: I successfully managed to clone M1 onto one other drive, with M2 lagging behind but still making progress. I then started cloning M1 again and after several minutes notice it too is now lagging and stuck at <25% progress. M2 has now been stuck as well at <50% for a while now, also unusual. After letting them run longer and seeing no change, I decide to stop and start the cloning processes on each a few times, and while M2's NVME cradle seemed to start cloning, it never made any progress. The NVME cradle with M1 refused to start cloning. After doing some research I plug the NVME cradles into my laptop to see what's going on and see that, SOMEHOW, BitLocker has activated on M1 and M2 and was waiting for an encryption key to begin encrypting. Just...how?? I was able to stop the encryption and re-disable BitLocker and have cloned one other drive from M1 at this point, but this is not an issue I want to deal with repeatedly. Any ideas how to avoid this and prevent it from happening?