The antibonding molecular orbital (ABMO) is more destabilized than the bonding molecular orbital (BMO) is stabilized due to the normalization of molecular orbitals when mixing atomic orbitals from different atoms. The bonding and non-bonding orbitals are expressed as \(\psi_\pm=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}(1\pm S)}(\phi_A\pm \phi_B)\), where \(S=\langle B|A \rangle\). The bonding energies are approximated by \(E_\pm\approx \pm H_{AB}/(1\pm S)\). Since \(1-S\) is significantly smaller than \(1+S\), the destabilization of the antibonding orbital exceeds the stabilization of the bonding orbital.
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