Has the thought occured to muse? And I'm not talking about reusing assets, guns or ships, but rather about integrating the AI into a new PvP gamemode.
There's many possible ways I think this could work;
The AI could act as a 3rd 'team' of sorts- like for example, the gamemode where players attempt to intercept and bring home those balloon-thing resources, could easily translate into PvP. Teams compete for resources which they steal from AI and each other, until a certain limit is reached. Another example would be a variation of the usual CK/CP, with AI ships contesting player-held points and defending neutral ones(I'm pretty sure someone has already suggested that in the past).
The AI could alternatively be part of each team- e.g. , similarly to mobas, a gamemode could revolve around progressively pushing into the enemy team's territory, destroying enemy defensive structures and AI ships while defending your own, until a team is left with no more structures, at which point it loses the ability to respawn (kinda like some sort of last man standing/tower defense combination or something).
ps: I'm sure there was a similar thread made somewhere somewhen but I can't seem to find it