M1 Advisor bets its AI service can reach households traditional wealth managers often turn away. The Chicago-based investing platform launched the service on Oct. 6, 2026, through its SEC-registered affiliate, M1 Advisory Services LLC.
The robo-adviser offers fiduciary advice with no account minimum and no advisory fee through Dec. 31, 2027. Clients need an M1 brokerage account and must sign a separate advisory agreement to enroll.
M1 charges a separate $3 monthly platform fee. It waives that fee for clients who hold $10,000 or more with M1 for at least one day in a 30-day billing cycle.
How M1 Advisor Bets on AI
M1 founder and CEO Brian Barnes said the service uses clients’ live account positions, cost basis and cash. He said that setup lets a client ask which shares to sell to cover a tax bill and see the tax cost of each choice before acting.
Clients can carry out an action in the same place, Barnes said. He described the integration as combining investing, retirement accounts, borrowing, cash and advice in one service.
M1 reports more than 300,000 clients and more than $14 billion in platform-wide assets as of September 2026, according to a company fact sheet. Its advisory business is smaller: M1 Advisory Services reported $1.48 billion in non-discretionary regulatory assets across 11,400 accounts in a Form ADV filed Oct. 1.
Barnes said conventional wealth managers often set minimums because human advice is expensive to deliver. He argued that AI lowers the cost of serving households below the levels many firms accept. M1 joins other startups using AI instead of human advisers, including Y Combinator-backed Astor and San Francisco-based Era. Range has also described plans to replace human advisers with AI.
Who the Service Is Designed to Serve
Barnes said M1 is building for people who are doing well and want to improve their finances, often in their 30s and 40s. He described them as earners with savings who remain below the level at which a private wealth manager would take them on.
Limits, Accountability and Fees
The brochure names Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon among M1 Advisor’s AI providers. Barnes said M1 surrounds the models with an investment knowledge base, client account data, compliance rules and testing before release, followed by monitoring. He said M1 remains the fiduciary regardless of which model it uses.
M1’s disclosure warns that AI systems can produce plausible but incorrect information. It tells clients to independently verify facts material to an investment decision. Research from advisor fintech Saturn found mainstream AI models answered financial questions incorrectly in 57% of cases.
Barnes said M1 Advisor is held to the same fiduciary standard as any SEC-registered adviser. He said clients retain their rights under securities laws and remedies for failures such as gross negligence or material breach. The client agreement does not ask them to give up those rights, he said.
M1 says the fee waiver lasts through Dec. 31, 2027. Its brochure filing summary refers to an annual advisory fee of up to 0.20%, but the company says that wording came from an early beta draft and does not apply to the live product. Barnes said the company has not settled on future pricing.
M1 Finance paid $850,000 in March 2024 after Finra found violations tied to its influencer program, as InvestmentNews reported. For related reading, Financial Tech Times has covered AI models in lending, Range’s fintech expansion and a fintech brokerage platform. Those stories offer separate coverage of AI, financial technology and investing.
